Program Mission and Principles

Program Mission and Principles

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ECHO’s mission is to enhance the health of children for generations to come. To help us meet this mission, the ECHO Program established four guiding principles under which to operate. These principles form a set of distinct yet related ideals that move the program closer to achieving its vision. These principles are Impact, Teamwork, Responsibility, and Value. Change is inevitable and the ECHO Program looks to employ these principles in every process, interaction, and task as a means of maintaining quality and attaining excellence.

Impact

The ECHO Program characterizes Impact as measurable enhancements in child health in the five ECHO health outcome domains. The Program’s vision is that ECHO contributes to these enhancements by providing research results that inform changes in programs, policies, or practices. This programmatic vision fits with the objective of the Program to catalyze solution-oriented observational and intervention research. Thus, a key to ECHO Program success is consistent messaging to ECHO investigators and the wider scientific community that enhancing child health is the overarching goal of all ECHO research. The ECHO Program can facilitate ECHO Program Impact by actively engaging ECHO investigators to promote an atmosphere of trust; to foster a culture in which ECHO investigators share their scientific ideas with each other and their data with the broader research community; to advocate for innovative, transdisciplinary research practices; and to support strategic solution-oriented research initiatives that engage end-user stakeholders both during research question development and dissemination of results.

Teamwork

The ECHO Program classifies Teamwork as a group of individuals working well together, promoting inclusivity, and incorporating the expertise and viewpoints of all involved. The intent of this principle is to allow the ECHO Program, and all involved in ECHO, to reach beyond additive or sequential approaches to problem-solving. Rather, it seeks to achieve collaborative integration that transcends the professional or disciplinary boundaries between ECHO Program staff and grantees so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The ECHO Program can facilitate Teamwork among staff and grantees by providing vision for shared scientific goals; promoting innovative approaches to collaboration; introducing active engagement strategies that enhance trust; fostering a culture that prizes the sharing of ideas and information with each other; and reminding all ECHO components to work well together as we build capacity, design and conduct clinical trials; and leverage the resources of the ECHO Cohort to generate high impact research that informs the enhancement of child health.

Responsibility

The ECHO Program considers Responsibility to include ensuring that ECHO grantees conduct transparent and unbiased scientific research. The ECHO Program fosters responsibility by identifying primary roles and responsibilities of ECHO staff members. ECHO does this by creating an environment in which staff can both act independently and know when to engage other ECHO team members in program evaluation and oversight. The ECHO Program additionally ensures staff have the ability and resources needed, while also fostering accountability among staff. The ECHO Program additionally ensures Responsibility by establishing expectations of grantees to conduct research in an ethical manner—recognizing the potential sensitivities since ECHO participants include pregnant women and children, producing and disseminating valid and reliable scientific findings, and delivering findings on appropriate timelines.

Value

The ECHO Program defines Value as the return on public investment in terms of enhancements in child health or intermediate outcomes such as changes in programs, policies, or practices. The ECHO Program maximizes value through a series of mechanisms, including but not limited to communicating expectations, allocating funding, and providing guidance so that investigators focus on key processes and deliverables; aligning staff capabilities with leadership roles and responsibilities to enhance benefit to the ECHO Program and awardees; coordinating grant resources to keep ECHO awardees within scope, on schedule, and within costs; identifying risks to scientific output, and helping to mitigate them, through implementation and evaluation of protocols, policies, and research results; fostering a culture in which ECHO investigators share their data with the broader research community; and facilitating dissemination of research findings so that they are maximally translatable into enhancing the health of children.

Commitment to Diversity in the ECHO Program

The ECHO Program seeks a better future for children by supporting the inclusion and engagement of a diverse cohort and implementing science to understand and reduce health disparities. Further, we commit to promoting a diverse community of research staff and scientists in the ECHO program and future child health researchers.

Goals for Ensuring Diversity in ECHO

  • Encourage and support efforts to engage in science that is not racist or discriminatory.
  • Engage in and promote scientific products (including BIG WINS) that directly address racial and ethnic health disparities, especially those that are solution oriented.
  • Ensure representation of racial and ethnic minorities into the ECHO cohort.
  • Increase the diversity of the scientific community at all levels.