This is an interesting press release from Open Health Tools, a collaborative effort with various facets of the healthcare industry and led by Misys Open Source Solutions.  Healthcare IT can only move forward towards its ultimate goal and usefulness if disparate systems can communicate with each other and allow information to flow freely.  This is important for portability of information and accessibility of that same information for healthcare professionals in different sectors.  Imagine an emergency room doctor in Miami being able to call up all of the medical history of an unconcious patient on vacation and know what they're allergic to, that they recently had treatment for a cancerous tumor and took medicine to boost their red blood cell count.  All information that may be important for that patient's care.  Now, imagine that information is out there, but that ER doc can't read it because their system doesn't communicate with the system that the patient's oncologist and/or family doctor uses. 
The idea behind this is to make all those systems able to communicate with each other and make that information available to healthcare providers that can benefit from it.