The end of the calendar year is a time for celebration. Today we celebrate ECHO’s many recent successes and how they showcase the principles that guide our work, and we anticipate even greater impact in 2024.

ECHO’s solution-oriented approach means that we focus our research on informing programs, policies, and practices to promote long-lasting health for our country’s children. For example, our work on child health disparities demonstrates that they may be present as early as infancy, how they widen as children grow, and, equally importantly, what may drive them in the first place. This type of research emphasizes our approach to real-world solutions, aided by collaboration with many organizations, like yours, with whom we share our commitment to enhancing child health for generations to come.

The next year holds great promise for both the observational work of the ECHO Cohort Consortium, which has just launched its second 7-year cycle, and the intervention research of the ECHO Institutional Developmental Award (IDeA) States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network (ISPCTN). In early 2024, ECHO Cohort Study Sites will launch our new protocol that will follow over 30,000 current child participants and will enroll approximately 30,000 new pregnancies and their offspring. A novel addition is our preconception cohort that will follow several thousand women and their partners to examine how environmental factors even before pregnancy begins can affect their children.

Our investigators have published many papers in peer-reviewed journals this year, bringing our program lifetime total to more than 1500. These publications span a broad spectrum of topics across ECHO’s child health focus areas, highlighting our collaborative team approach to science. We are excited to continue producing high-impact research in the next year and beyond. Please see the ECHO publication database to explore these papers and check back often to find our most recent work.

—Matthew W. Gillman, MD, SM