The Role of Tele-Education in Advancing Mental Health Quality of Care: A Content Analysis of Project ECHO Recommendations

Introduction: Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (Project ECHO®) is a global-guided practice initiative aimed at building primary care capacity and improving health care quality for underserved populations. This tele-education model brings together primary care providers and subject-matter specialists in online communities of practice to share knowledge, discuss complexities in patient care, and collaborate to reduce health disparities. Methods: Using co-generated clinical care recommendations from ECHO Ontario Mental Health, a mental health focused ECHO program, we explored alignment of recommendations across the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) six domains of health care quality to characterize its impact. A total of 417 recommendations, made for 32 patient cases, were analyzed using a modified directed content analysis method. Each recommendation was coded with one or multiple codes, representing each of the six IOM domains. Key examples of recommendations within each domain are described. Results: An average of 13 recommendations were generated per patient case. The effective domain occurred at least once in each complete set of patient care recommendations. The next highest occurring domain was safe (71.9%), followed by patient-centered (68.8%), efficient (40.6%), equitable (18.8%), and timely (12.5%). Recommendation distribution across the entire data set was effective (97.8%), safe (15.6%), patient-centered (12.0%), efficient (3.6%), equitable (1.9%), and timely (1.4%). Discussion: As the first study to characterize ECHO's impact using health care quality domains, the study highlights ECHO's significant focus on effective, safe, and patient-centered care. These findings can inform ways for ECHO to target quality improvement and measure impact in additional health care quality domains, such as efficient, equitable, and timely.