Great point! A lot of people in the clinical world and health IT world completely agree with you. The real difficulty is opening the channel for secure communication between practices and hospitals, electronic health record vendors, and health information exchanges.

Have you heard of RHEx (http://wiki.siframework.org/RHEx, https://github.com/project-rhex/simple_rhex)? It's an open source implementation of hData (http://www.projecthdata.org) and provides a RESTful, secure way to transmit patient data.