To address the challenges at scale, Project ECHO and ECHO India have embarked on the ambitious plan to establish a robust digital infrastructure called iECHO. This is a result of many many deliberations on reimagining our role, reimagining the roles of our partners and most importantly the role played by the healthcare workers themselves. It required us to dig deep to understand what is the core interaction we are trying to solve and what will help us do that faster, better, and at scale. How do we move from being a tool to an infrastructure?

Moving from a solver to an enabler: We see our role evolving from solving the problem to distributing the ability to solve to many other solvers like our superhubs, hubs, or sometimes even our participants. Our role is to ensure that there is an enabling technology infrastructure, defined standards, and a proper governance model to support all these solvers.

Reimaging how hubs create their own ECHO: iECHO allows hubs to onboard themselves on the ECHO platform faster, helps them build and operate multiple programmes and onboard their spokes too. They can access all the programme data at one place with ways to manage multiple programmes, see details of attendance, get robust data analytics on participation, conduct assessments, and issue certification to the participants.

Restoring the agency of the participants: iECHO democratizes the ability of a participant to join an ECHO session, helps capture all the learnings, and allows a diverse group of learners to join a rich, vibrant and interactive digital community of practice.

Empowering with Data: Data can be a powerful tool for not just us, but our partners and our participants too. As a societal platform, we feel it is a tool to empower the ecosystem to see, sense, and solve better.

While ECHO India’s focus is currently on healthcare and education, the ECHO model can be deployed in many other sectors as well, such as education, sustainable livelihoods, and even the judiciary. Also, within healthcare, the disease-agnostic ECHO model can be leveraged in any domain. We envisage that the innovative and continuously improving iECHO platform will drive the expansion of the ECHO movement in the future and will help to evolve vibrant Communities of Practices that will work independently to solve different societal problems at scale.

ECHO aims to touch 1 billion lives globally by making the right knowledge available in the right place.