With all the hype surrounding Web Services, it was inevitable that the healthcare insurance environment would be identified as a fertile ground
for this technology. After all, this marketplace is characterized by:

• Many-to-Many relationships between brokers, providers, payors,
  plan administrators and consumers.
• Extremely heterogeneous IT environments
• Demand for exposing business logic and data both within and
  across institutional boundaries.
• Emerging acceptance of standardized transaction formats as
  a result of HIPAA regulations.

Given the above, there would seem to be a clear technological imperative for deployment of Web Services in healthcare. The real question is: Who will pay
for it and why? To put it another way: Is this a solution looking for a problem
or is there a real value proposition here? Click on the link below

Healthcare and the Internet