Dear Colleagues,
As the Center for Telehealth Research and Policy (C-TRaP) marks its first anniversary, I wanted to share how it’s been working to improve Missourians’ access to care and what lies ahead.
Estabilished in 2025 by a $4 million Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grant, C-TRaP is a National Telehealth Research Center within the Missouri Telehealth Network. Experts from across Mizzou — the School of Medicine, the College of Health Sciences, the College of Engineering and the Sinclair School of Nursing — work with peers at Michigan State University and the University of Mississippi to push the future of telehealth.
Directed by Mirna Becevic, PhD, C-TRaP's mission is to evaluate the impact of telehealth on patient outcomes, health care systems and policy, generating evidence-based solutions to improve equitable access to care — especially in rural and underserved communities.
Advancing Project ECHO
One of C-TRaP's first-year highlights was innovative research focused on Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO), a mentoring and educational initiative in which clinicians like primary care providers connect with experts via videoconferencing.
As part of its ECHO work, C-TRaP was recently awarded second place for the Telehealth Innovation Award by the HRSA OAT Grantee Meeting for its AI-supported clinical knowledge retrieval system.
C-TRaP also leverages ECHO for clinical behavior analysis. For example, Mizzou School of Medicine researchers identified significant differences in opioid prescribing patterns. ECHO participants had lower rates of high-dose opioid prescribing patterns, reflecting evidence-based recommendations and use of alternative pain management methods.
Project ECHO has provided over 129,000 hours of instruction to 12,735 unique learners across more than 3,800 organizations. In addition to pain management, topics covered have ranged from asthma to autism to diabetes to kidney disease.
C-TRaP Looks to 2030
Project ECHO is an early success story at C-TRaP, which is grant-funded through 2030, but education is just one component of its mission.
Other key objectives include:
Improve Outcomes
- Telehealth has remarkable potential to improve clinical outcomes, particularly in rural areas. C-TRaP is testing whether remote patient monitoring can cut 30-day readmissions for rural congestive heart failure patients by as much as 40%.
Inform Policy
- COVID-19 provided an unprecedented opportunity to understand telehealth’s benefits. By tracking telehealth use among Medicaid recipients before and after the pandemic, C-TRaP hopes to inform state and federal policy.
Transform Practice
- Using AI and Medicaid claims data, C-TRaP is measuring how Project ECHO is not only educating clinicians but shifting how they practice. C-TRaP actively contributes to clinical research, with five manuscripts currently under review.
Understand Adoption
- C-TRaP is studying leaders from 34 North American ECHO hubs to discover drivers and barriers to adoption. It recently hosted a webinar in March about the state of telehealth and another about the diffusion of telehealth innovation.
Advance Secure Data-Sharing
- Telehealth requires sharing protected health information and other sensitive data across networks. C-TRaP is working to build a privacy-oriented federated learning repository that enables safe, decentralized AI model training.
As C-TRaP enters its second year, its momentum continues to build. In addition to the five manuscripts mentioned above, it has three poster presentations in review and four policy briefs in development.
Missourians deserve access to care, no matter the size of their community — and C-TRaP is making it a reality.
Sincerely,
Rick Barohn, MD
Executive Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Hugh E. and Sarah D. Stephenson Dean, School of Medicine
rbarohn@health.missouri.edu
