HealthNet was a satellite communication service that provided healthcare workers in developing nations with access to current medical literature.
The idea of SatelLife began in 1985 as a project to include healthcare organizations from the southern hemisphere in global health discussions.
[2] The HealthNet constellation provided email services, access to news, electronic conferences, and offline access to websites using a store-and-forward message scheme.
The news included selected abstracts and summaries of major medical journals.
[7] In 1998, SatelLife announced an agreement to share unused capacity from Healthsat-2 with Volunteers In Technical Assistance (VITA), who would operate Healthsat-2 as VITASat 1R.