The Out-Patient Department (OPD) of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Jammu, will start operating on June 1 of this year.
"The second batch will continue thereafter. The 30-member faculty has already been inducted and the entire six-storey AIIMS building will be ready by early next year," Union Minister of State for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Jitendra Singh, said on Saturday.
The Minister was on a visit to AIIMS at Jammu for the inspection of the upcoming new blocks and inauguration of the recently-developed facilities, during which he suggested that in order to develop an exclusive identity for the institution, the focus should be on the futuristic areas.
While appreciating the progress made during the brief period since Shakti Gupta took over as the Director of AIIMS Jammu, Singh suggested that in order to develop an exclusive identity for the institution, the focus should be on futuristic areas like Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AIIMS could be a pioneer in North India in developing AI-based healthcare infrastructure.
Asserting that AI and Digital Medicine are critical for the future of healthcare, the Minister said, "Tele-medicine and robotic surgery have already taken over in a big way and the indispensable utility of these new options was realised during the pandemic times."
The minister also announced that AIIMS Jammu will function in close collaboration with CSIR-IIIM, Jammu.
An MoU was signed in the presence of the Minister, between AIIMS Jammu Director Shakti Gupta and CSIR-IIIM Jammu Director D Srinivasa Reddy on behalf of the two institutions.
"It is an irony that CSIR-IIIM Jammu and Government Medical College Jammu existed in the close vicinity of just about 4 km from each other and even though both the institutions were dedicated to medical research, there was hardly any collaboration between the two in the past. Every effort would be made to bring in closer integration of IIIM with GMC and also between IIIM Jammu and AIIMS Jammu, both of which happen to be Central government institutions," he said.
