The real joke is the government requires interoperability. In practice this just means all the medical data crisscrossing the network is unencrypted and in a very poorly specified text based format that varies from hospital to hospital (and even at the same hospital over time). It is interoperable in the sense that anyone can plug in to the network, listen for packets, and write their own parser for every event from every data source and store it in their own proprietary database.