Like many health-care facilities in poor and isolated regions, the Muhimbili center now has the opportunity to involve the world's medical community in its struggle to prevent and treat illness and injury. Thanks to HealthNet, a satellite-based network for health workers, the Health Foundation in New York learned of the center's particular needs and responded by sending a free shipment of phenytoin, a drug that reduces pain and promotes healing of burn wounds. The Muhimbili center also relies on HealthNet for consultations with specialists. HealthNet has played an important role in other Third World medical developments as well. In early 1995, for example, physicians in central Africa shared vital, up-to-the-minute information over HealthNet during the deadly Ebola virus outbreak.

HealthNet is one of several email, database, and medical-library services offered by SatelLife, a Boston-based nonprofit organization working to bring the information age to the poorest and remotest regions of Africa, Asia, and South America.

In her book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, Author Laurie Garrett writes about SatelLife: "For the first time, physicians in the developing countries could consult colleagues in neighboring nations or medical libraries and data banks to help solve puzzling cases and alert one another to disease outbreaks."