New Delhi, March 13 (IANS): The ministry of health and family welfare on Friday said that it would soon utilise the services of the National Medical College Network (NMCN) - a national task force on tele-medicine - to combat the scarcity of doctors in the rural parts of the country.

"We have already set up the regional centres. We are soon going to start the services of NMCN as well. We are trying to start it within six months. People in the rural parts of the country will be highly benefited," said Navneet Kumar Dhamija, deputy commissioner of tele-medicine at the health ministry.

Tele-medicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies to provide clinical health care at a distance and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in far flung rural communities.

Dhamija said the ministry has already set up a few tertiary care academic institutes in different regions of the country known as Medical Knowledge Resource Centres.

"Each of which will be connected to medical colleges (nodes) in that region," he told reporters during a workshop organised for the representatives of the regional centres.

The workshop was organised on the sidelines of the "Endo-Surg 2015", an initiative to update surgery processes. The event was held at AIIMS and was inaugurated by the director of the institution M.C. Misra.

The regional centres include Shillong in the north-east, Pondicherry in the south, Chandigarh in the north and Mumbai in the west.

Dhamija said over 2.5 lakh villages will be benefited through the tele-medicine network.

Additional professor of surgery at AIIMS, Subodh Kumar, who is closely associated with the project said the attempt is to bring more and more colleges under the centres.

"District hospitals and dispensaries in villages will also be connected to it. This will fulfil the gap that has prevailed in remote areas due to the absence of doctors," he said.