This paper describes the approach to information sharing being adopted by Synapses, a pan-European project funded under the EU Health Telematics Programme. The emphasis in Synapses is on developing standards to enable sharing, in whole or in part, of electronic healthcare records between distributed healthcare providers and institutions. The current technological solutions available for data sharing, including federated database systems, gateways, data warehousing, messaging and the web are insufficient on their own to meet the needs of Synapses. Thus in Synapses several different, but complementary technologies are merged in an open, distributed object-oriented environment. Furthermore, in order to safeguard the legal, ethical and clinical integrity of the record, it is essential not only to preserve the meaning of the data being transferred, but also its context and structure. Synapses solves this problem by defining a standard architecture for the federated electronic healthcare record.