An apparatus for communicating health care data from a sender to a receiver is provided. The apparatus has a first computer system, a second computer system, and a rules engine. The first computer system has health care data stored therein. The second computer system is in operable communication with, and is configured to extract the health care data from, the first computer system. The rules engine normalizes the extracted health care data to a predefined format. The rules engine defines a plurality of health care data fields in the predefined format, as well as a plurality of relationships between fields of normalized data.