The Perinatal Substance Use ECHO program from Hennepin Healthcare provides virtual education and training to providers to best support pregnant and parenting people with substance use during their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. This includes educational sessions, case reviews, and discussions of best practice templates and protocols specifically focused on inpatient and outpatient perinatal substance use and substance use disorders. The goal of this ECHO Series is to develop standardized treatment approaches for perinatal substance use care that will allow for statewide standardization of best practices for all birthing patients affected by substance use and substance use disorders.

Session Presenter: Gretchen Buchanan, PhD, LMFT, LADC | Redleaf Center for Family Healing | Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute

Dr. Gretchen Buchanan is the Senior Researcher at the Redleaf Center for Family Healing, Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Minnesota. She has extensive clinical and research expertise working with families who struggle with mental health and substance use concerns and intergenerational trauma. She is an implementation scientist whose research focuses on improving the quality of healthcare and access to it for parents and families through integrating mental and physical health, substance use, and social support. Making more visible the importance of relational health, including parent-child and family relationships and the clinician-patient relationship to clinicians, healthcare workers, and policymakers requires engagement with everyone involved. She received her Master’s degree from the University of Nevada, Reno; her PhD from the University of Minnesota Department of Family Social Science in 2021, followed by a National Institute of Mental Health-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis focused on implementation science and mental health services research.

Date: August 12, 2026 from 12:15 – 1:15 pm CDT

Location: Virtual