The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) www.samhsa.gov within HHS, wants to establish a collaboration between Project ECHO http://echo.unm.edu and the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) www.asam.org.
The goal is to pilot the first demonstration of the ECHO model on a national scale with a national medical society to treat addiction in primary care settings with the intent to improve treatment access and reduce overdose deaths.
The Project ECHO model at the Health Sciences Center at the University of New Mexico makes use of video conferencing to connect disease specialists at an academic medical center with multiple primary care teams simultaneously. These virtual “teleCHO clinics” meet periodically and primary care team members are able to learn by presenting their own patient cases and by listening to other cases from their colleagues.
Researchers at the ECHO Institute have demonstrated that the Project ECHO model can allow primary care providers to achieve treatment results that are similar to those achieved by specialists. It has been found that the use of the ECHO model to recruit and train primary care physicians to use medication-assisted treatments to treat opioid use disorders can be very successful.
The result is that there have been rapid increases in the number of trained providers who practice in rural and traditionally underserved settings to achieve treatment results via the use of Project ECHO that are similar to those achieved by specialists in urban areas.
This is not a solicitation for a competitive proposal since it is SAMHSA’s intent to sole source the contract to the University of Mexico so no solicitation document is available. However, if responsible sources have determined that they can provide the same service, they must submit product information and a capabilities statement by September 3, 2015.
For more information, contact Zipora Chepkoit in the Office of Program Support Center at zipora.chepkoit@psc.hhs.gov or go to www.grants.gov.