At the end of March almost $5 billion had been paid out as incentives to 76,000 healthcare providers for deploying electronic health records systems, the ONC's Health IT policy committee reported at a in Washington on Wednesday. The payments are made to providers who meet the first of three stages of so-called "meaningful use" of EHRs, and were reimbursed for a portion of the cost of implementing them.

"Not a single hospital has been rejected. All have succeeded in getting their payments," Williams said. "We've seen tremendous progress across the board in health IT adoption."

One of the most prominent aspects of , which is undergoing a six-month comment period, is the requirement for healthcare providers to be able to share patient medical data among healthcare providers through HIEs.

However, three-quarters of the time, primary care providers do not get simple discharge information from hospitals on their patients, said Williams, citing the latest survey figures from 2010.