Mary G. Turco, EdD

Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine,

Consultant, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Center for Learning and Professional Development

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Lebanon, NH

Mary G. Turco, EdD, FACME is clinical associate professor of Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and an education outcomes researcher and learning consultant at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock (D-H) Medical Center in Hanover and Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA. Turco's scholarship and consultation services focus on health professions education and outcomes research across the education continuum and health professions. She supports Undergraduate and Graduate Medical Education, Inter-professional Continuing Education/Professional Development, and Simulation-Based Education and Research. From 2004 to 2014 she was director of the Center for Continuing Education in the Health Sciences and of Continuing Medical Education (CME) at D-H and Geisel. She has taught at the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels at Dartmouth and has been involved with many global health initiatives including the Dartmouth Haiti Response (to the 2010 Earthquake) and projects in Nicaragua, Tanzania, Russia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Turco is Immediate Past President and a Fellow of the Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME) where she has served in a variety of leadership positions including Scholarship Committee Vice Chair. She is a co-editor of the new book Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Healthcare: Better Education, Better Patient Outcomes (Wolters Kluwer, 2017) to which she was also a contributor. She has contributed articles and chapters to various journals and books including Continuing Medical Education: Looking Back, Planning Ahead (Dartmouth College Press, Lebanon, NH, 2011). She is an invited presenter on the topic academic CME/CPD for national and international conferences and webinars. Turco is a member of the Tri-Group Council (Association for Hospital Medical Education, Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions, and SACME) which collaborates to support the Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions and World Congress on Continuing Professional Development in the Health Professions (which she co-chaired in 2016). She earned her doctoral degree at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Sanjeev Arora, MD, FACG, MACP

Director and Founder,

Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes)

Distinguished Professor of Medicine,

Department of Internal Medicine

University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center

Albuquerque, NM

Sanjeev Arora, MD, FACG, MACP is the Director and Founder of Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes). He is a Distinguished Professor of Medicine with tenure in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. Dr. Arora developed the ECHO model as a way to dramatically improve both capacity and access to specialty care for rural and underserved populations. This is accomplished by linking expert inter-disciplinary specialist teams with primary care clinicians through teleECHO clinics, where the experts mentor primary care clinicians to treat complex conditions via guidance, feedback and didactic education. This helps rural clinicians develop knowledge and self-efficacy so they can adopt research findings and deliver best practice care.

The first teleECHO clinic was developed in 2003 to respond to a growing health crisis hepatitis C and has since expanded to cover over 60 disease areas and complex issues at over 115 academic medical centers in 23 countries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense have also adopted the ECHO model to enhance access to specialty care. In 2007, Project ECHO came in first among more than 300 entries from 27 countries in winning the Changemakers award. This international competition was sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Ashoka Foundation to identify programs that are changing the paradigm of how medicine is practiced.

In 2011, ECHO published a prospective cohort study in the New England Journal of Medicine, to prove that treatment for HCV by primary care providers using the ECHO model is as safe and effective as treatment by specialists at an academic medical center.

Over the last 13 years Dr Arora has received more than 65 million dollars of grant support. Dr Arora has been awarded numerous prestigious awards including: the Teresa Heinz and the Heinz Family Foundation 19th Heinz Award for Public Policy, the Second Rosenthal Award from the Rosenthal Family Foundation, the Presidential Award of Distinction from the University of New Mexico and the American College of Physicians and the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) President’s Award. Dr Arora was also recognized during World Hepatitis Day 2014, at the White House in Washington DC, as a leader in advancing efforts to address viral hepatitis and the goals of the Action Plan for the Prevention, Care, and Treatment of Viral Hepatitis.

In very recent developments, the ECHO Act, initiated by ECHO partners across the U.S., was passed unanimously through both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama on December 14, 2016. This legislation mandates and empowers two federal agencies (the General Accounting Office, or GAO, and the Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA) to study the impact of Project ECHO on the U.S. health system, and will serve to lay the pathway for sustainable funding of the model.

Global Alliance for Medical Education (GAME)

Global Alliance for Medical Education (GAME)