HL7 To Make Intellectual Property Available at No Cost

On Tuesday, HL7 International announced that, beginning in 2013, it will make most of its intellectual property, including standards, available at no cost under licensing agreements. 

For more details, see HealthcareInformatics, 9/4, which refers to:

a produced statement [from] John Halamka, M.D., MS, CIO at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School: “This announcement is the most significant standards development in the past decade ... It ensures that every stakeholder will have ready access to the content standards they need for Meaningful Use.”

This statement may, however, be a mite misleading. As I understand matters, those wishing to satisfy Meaningful Use criteria  can use CCR from ASTM instead of CCD from the HL7 shop (and even CCD is now a chimera of CCR/HL7 CDA). HL7 seems to have been unresponsive to actual needs, to the degree that it was surprised and embarrassed by CCR.