No less an authority than the News Hour with Jim Lehrer highlighted the increased use of telemedicine in international development last week. Jim Grady, who, with his wife, Peg, laid the foundations of Medical Missions for Children using $85,000 of their own retirement money, spoke about the video clinics MMC has set up in 27 top U.S. and European hospitals, as well as the new Medical Broadcasting Channel, which streams more than 25,000 hours of medical programming to thousands of institutions worldwide.

After you view the News Hour segment on Medical Missions for Children, be sure to take a look at Interplast, an organization NTEN featured a few months ago. Interplast provides free reconstructive surgery to children in the developing world and launched Grand Rounds, a web site that allows plastic surgeons from around the world to share information and ask for guidance. They even offer several virtual tours, which make for very interesting, if rather gruesome, reading. Consider yourself warned.

If you want to get in on the game yourself, IBM just released the Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler -- try saying that a few times fast -- as open source. Now part of the Open Healthcare Framework Project, STEM models, and attempts to determine the best way to combat, the outbreak of infectious diseases. This is serious data mining, so if, like me, you struggle even saying "Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler" out loud, you might consider leaving the actual work to epidemiologists, and just be thankful that, as Joseph Jasinski, program director for health care and life sciences at IBM, says, "We felt we had a lot to offer, and individuals at the company felt some societal responsibility. So we thought we would see what we could do."