I used to work with a healthcare company and dealt the 837 file format and FTP batches and wrote a pretty neat-o parser for it, the reason is simple- inertia. A

I used to work with a healthcare company and dealt the 837 file format and FTP batches and wrote a pretty neat-o parser for it, the reason is simple- inertia. And it's not like people aren't trying because there's been a huge push to get REST-like APIs in place, but when you have close to 40 years of software infrastructure in place it's non-trivial to explain to the boss why you need to spend money on something that gets everyone paid either way. I think it would be truly revolutionary if we could change the format, but what I think would be almost a better step is to write open source parsers that can accurately translate X12 into something sane and keep the interchange the same so that everything can be balanced out like a checkbook. Check out the 835 format for this part as it's supposed to be a data stream of transactions. Too bad the dozens of flavors of X12 are locked behind licensing and thousands of dollars of books for the rules :/ Additional reading on this god-awful data format: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19398-01/820-1275/6ncv5s178/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19398-01/820-1275/6ncv5s178/inde...