This Recommendation is designed to provide wide-area communication in support of health-related activities, where the communication can usefully be undertaken as structured messages. It aims to remove the need for medical staff and patients to be co-located, and supports both multi-party (for audit and training purposes) as well as one-to-one interactions. It recognises that in many cases interactions between medical staff and patients need to be supplemented by unstructured voice and/or video communication, which may need synchronization with the structured message flows. There are many standards development groups involved in health-care, including standardization of various aspects of medical and dental and DNA records. This Recommendation recognizes and identifies their defined data formats and interactions using ASN.1 object identifiers (OIDs). It aims to support "world-wide medicines" (plural). This is intended to include not only Western medicine and drugs, but also alternative therapies, including herbal remedies and interventions such as acupuncture. This Recommendation specifies complete protocols (including a service discovery protocol) using TCP/IP and SOAP/HTTP, with bindings similar to those specified in ITU-T X.1083 | ISO/IEC 24708. Security features are provided using ITU-T X.509 | ISO/IEC 9594-8 and its derivatives. The communications require the identification of a variety of objects ranging from medical practitioners, medical and dental record formats, to drugs and surgical intervention procedures. It also requires identification of physiological quantities and units. This Recommendation specifies ASN.1 Information Object Classes for the identification of these objects, and other parts of this series of Recommendations provide the Internationalized Object Identifiers to identify objects in these classes. The other five parts (covering the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, culturology and psychology) provide the associated Information Object definitions and assign OIDs for both quantities and units and other objects associated with the fields of study.