Charles Jaffe, CEO of HL7, said his organization chose to remove the membership fee requirement for the HL7 standards to foster greater adoption.

"We felt ... the world healthcare community would be a better place if we could share this information. It sounds very apple pie and romantic, but it's the truth," Jaffe said. "HL7 believes that freely available standards more effectively advance healthcare information interoperability."

One of the most prominent aspects of Stage 2 of Meaningful Use is the requirement for healthcare providers to be able to share patient medical data with one another through health information exchanges.

However, three quarters of the time, primary care providers don't get simple discharge information from hospitals on their patients, according to Claudia Williams, director of the State HIE (Health Information Exchange) Program at the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology.

"Only 20% of hospitals are exchanging clinical records electronically in 2010," Williams said in in May. "A lot of information is not getting to its desired destination quickly enough or accurately enough. We're in a world where a lot of patient-information sharing still occurs on paper."