NEHTA has elected to use Web services as the basis for e-health interoperability in Australia for the following reasons:

• the specifications for Web services are open (ie non-proprietary)
• Web services technologies are designed specifically to address application to application communication in a way which is independent of the technology used to implement the application
• the basic Web services specifications have been widely adopted by most (if not all) major suppliers of application development technologies (ie tools which support the development of Web services are widely available)
• Web services uses the protocols and infrastructure of the internet, which is nearly ubiquitous, enabling a connectivity approach which is simple, open, and low-cost to join (ie not reliant on proprietary or closed infrastructure such as a VPN)

• Web services supports interoperability between applications which are based on different technologies (eg Sun Java, Microsoft.NET) in widely dispersed organisations (ie enables loosely-coupled connectivity between distributed components, providing a good fit to the Australian e-health environment)
• Web services support the implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (which is NEHTA’s approach to ensure that technical functionality is aligned with business processes)
• the technology is now proven with numerous examples of successful implementations in many industries.