Abstract: The present invention provides communications between networked computing devices using a high-level Extensible Markup Language (XML) structure. A plurality of desired transactions to be communicated between the networked computing devices are defined and an XML schema is established for each transaction. Communication session state information is maintained on each computing device during a session. Text-based transaction messages are sent between the networked computing devices using Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) and can include both data and instructions. In one preferred embodiment, the networked computing devices are an Internet web server and a wireless patient monitor and said text-based transaction messages are used to provide bi-directional transmission of data and instructions.