I worked in high tech industry and led projects for implementing universal databases. It takes time (and patience) to educate people. And sometimes the right person (as someone who understands how a database works and the world of the user) is not the person chosen to implement project. But well-designed databases offer a tremendous opportunity in medicine. It makes it easy to track symptoms and treatment outcomes across a grand variety of clinical pictures.
The idea of having a patient portal tied to a database of information is to make it easy for people to change doctors and to see the results of their tests and doctor's notes. But uniformity is required to segment things correctly in the underlying database - maybe that is why they use generic names of drugs so as not to confuse brand names and generics .
Clinics are supposed to be able to see each other's information on the patient - that is IF you are their patient. That is how they see your whole clinical picture...and also avoid duplicate tests. In the case of a medical emergency that will be critical!!!