Abstract: The invention is directed to systems and methods for communicating sensitive and/or confidential medical information with the use of encryption. Specifically, the invention is directed to transmitting a request for sensitive medical data, where the request includes a public key for encryption as an XML node. The public key may be used by the responding party to encrypt at least a portion of the response and respond to the request. The only party in the network path that is able to decrypt the message is the originator of the request because the requestor will have a private keys which is required to decrypt the response data.