> Well, actually HIPAA stands for "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act" - it's specifically about making health records portable.

No, it's about making health insurance portable. [0] (The Security and Privacy pieces—as well as the IT standards bits—are part of the one “accountability” piece of the title, and largely irrelevant to the “portability” piece.)

Health records, in terms of interoperability, weren't a big focus in the legislation (they became a bigger focus with meaningful use and related rules in the ACA.)

EDIT: to be fair, though, access to your own records is also part of the accountability part, which isn't exactly portability of records, but it's related.

[0] See, e.g , http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/portability.asp

Interesting. Yet we see basically zero portability. So what happened?