Grappling with acute shortage of medical faculty, the Union Health Ministry has decided to set up telemedicine infrastructure in all medical colleges and institutions to network each other in a phase-wise manner to ensure quality education to the students.
The green field project under the central scheme “e-Health including Telemedicine” will be entirely supported for five years by the Ministry after which the State Governments will be asked to take over its management.
“Many medical colleges in the rural as well as urban areas are facing paucity of teaching faculty because of various reasons. Networking of medical collges can bridge distance between student and teacher as well as teacher and teacher. Also, as quality of post-graduate education in the country need improvement, networking can help in meeting this need,” said a senior official from the Ministry.
The objective of the project will be to facilitate tele-education, (knowledge sharing, sharing of surgical and interventional skills, virtual class room, capacity building of human resources for health among others).
The students can also have access to specialist consultation online in specialised areas such as pathology, cardiology, radiology, dermatology, ophthalmology and oncology etc services. Besides, they will have access to electronic knowledge repositories like eBooks, eJournals and open source web knowledge resources.
“This infrastructure would facilitate continued professional skill development of Human Resources for Health (HRH). The proposed national network of medical colleges will follow a hierarchical architecture having a central hub housing the data centre to be designated as National Resource Center (NRC).
“The NRC will be networked with five regional hubs to be known as regional resource centres (RRCs) located at different regions of the country which in turn will be networked with medical colleges in that region,” the official added.
The project aims to setting up or upgradation of infrastructure in NRC, 5 RRCs and 35 medical colleges.
To ensure securing of data in case of disaster, JIPMER, Pudducherry (RRC) has been identified as the Disaster Recovery (DR) site for the purpose. Now, we are in the process of identifying an agency to execute and operate the telemedicine infrastructure in the medical colleges, the official added.