For 25 years, hospitals and clinics have paid as much as $1,200 a year to use the most popular set of standards for the electronic exchange of health information. On Tuesday, the nonprofit organization responsible for developing those standards said its intellectual property will be available for use free of charge beginning in the first quarter of 2013. “This announcement is the most significant standards development in the past decade,” said John Halamka, CIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and HMS professor of medicine.
