COVID-19 ECHO Series: By the Numbers

COVID-19 ECHO Series: By the Numbers

In our June 2020 podcast, we shared some information about the series that ECHO-Chicago has developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are three series developed and implemented that are focused on COVID-19: COVID-19 in Pediatric Populations, which meets every other week; COVID-19 in Adult Populations, which meets every other week; and COVID-19 in Skilled Nursing & Long-Term Care Facilities, which was a six-session series that ran in May and June. Since the first session on March 25, 2020*, we have had 846 participants join our sessions, 40% of whom have chosen to join us for more than one session. On average, our SNF series had an average of 36 participants per session and our other two series had a combined average of 93 participants per session.

We think so highly of our series’ participants who have joined us in our regular series since 2010 and are so glad that so many who have joined us before have come back for these COVID-specific session. It’s also incredible to be able to add that group of participants with everyone who has come to know us through these new series, and are excited to share that almost 70% of participants in these COVID-19 sessions are new to ECHO-Chicago! Since ECHO-Chicago began, it has been our mission to provide our trainings to any provider who wants to join, but most especially to focus on the providers who work at safety net institutions, including safety net hospitals, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), and Free and Charitable Clinics (FCCs). Across the three COVID series, 49.5% of our participants are providers at safety net healthcare institutions.

Each week as our sessions end, our Zoom chat box is filled with praise from participating providers, sharing the ways in which they’ve benefitted from that evening’s session. While we’re always honored by these impromptu moments of feedback, it is also important to our program that we’re more rigorously evaluating the experience and impact of the sessions. To that end, we began implementing Zoom polls at the end of each session to collect some of that information in-the-moment. The polls consist of two questions: 1. “Compared to before today’s session I feel __________ in control when it comes to addressing COVID in my professional capacity” with a 5-point Likert scale for participants to measure their feelings of control; 2. “Please rate the relevance of today’s ECHO content to your professional performance” with participants rating the content on a 5-point Likert scale.

The first question was developed by our Research Manager, Sandra Tilmon, MPH, based on the priority our ECHO-Chicago Director, Dr. Daniel Johnson, places on helping providers feel more equipped to treat COVID-19 amid the rapid changes in treatment, diagnosis, and prevention that we are collectively experiencing. Though participating providers—and our society collectively—may not feel in control of the pandemic, with these series we hope to share the tools and knowledge necessary for providers to feel more in control of their own clinical capacities. The second question was developed based on the concepts of a provider’s change in impact score[1] and helps ensure that the content being shared in these sessions reflects the needs and areas of interest of our participants. As the data below demonstrates, these sessions are largely seen as beneficial by participants in their ability to help providers feel more in control of their clinical work regarding the management of COVID-19. The data also shows that the majority of providers also feel that the information shared is relevant to their clinical practice.

We look forward to continuing the sessions and hope you’ll join us for the final two sessions of July. Click here to register for the pediatric session and here to register for the adult session. And thank you to our research team—Sandra and Project Coordinator Patrick Gower—for leading these evaluation efforts and for the data visualizations seen in this post! If you are interested in seeing more of our ECHO-Chicago data, our research team also maintains a data dashboard on our website which is available publicly and updated quarterly—it can be found here!

*Data up-to-date as of July 15, 2020

[1] Taatz, L., Wenzel, V., & Peiseler, G. J. (2017). CIS (change impact score) – a novel outcome measurement tool to quantify the relevance of medical education interventions on professional performance. Journal of European CME, 6(1), 1375377. https://doi.org/10.1080/21614083.2017.1375377