(The federal government, no less) creating an open source project to promote electronic health data exchange is a great idea. Building a community around the project is one of the ways to make it not only a good idea, but one that works. http://www.connectopensource.org/about/what-is-CONNECT
The government should have a good reason before it invests in closed software, content or database development. In general, information products funded by the public sector should be public products.