Definitely true. In the US, because fax and phone were carved out in HIPAA as not being ePHI, they have this special protected status that makes it totally cool for providers to fax records around, but sending emails something that risks jail time :/

I wouldn't underestimate the technological barriers to making interoperable health record systems actually useful. There are a lot of different kinds of medical information (SNOMED CT, the best ontology for healthcare, has >1M concepts!), and the best way to structure that information is an unsolved problem. There are lots of different ways out in the wild (complicated by there being lots of half-assed EHRs that were just made to grab incentive money), and the standards that are out there don't really help things (they are so broad that basically every EHR implements their own "flavor" of the standard).