Sounds like a terrible pain that you understand well enough to be able to solve. When you have, it might remove a major bottleneck and open the floodgates for more smart people to join, ultimately benefitting healthcare in a massive way.
Make people want to work in that industry :)
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/inde...
Long answer: It's not like people don't understand that the current situation is suboptimal. It's that any kind of change implemented unilaterally will leave you unable to communicate with your counterparties. The severe consequences of this (not getting paid, being out of compliance with HIPAA) means that any kind of change to health-care IT at a system-wide level requires an absolutely massive amount of politicking and often fails to improve the situation.
The problem is that health care institutions are so interlinked that driving any kind of global change is a process best measured in decades. Combine this with the fact that the culture in health care is very conservative, and people tend to be hostile towards change by default and you have a situation where it's often easier to leave the industry and save your sanity than to remain and continue bashing your head into a brick wall over and over again.
Also, for USA, legal requirements (such as HIPAA) are universal and can impose certain standards on the whole industry, as long as there's political will to do so.
The whole field feels like such a mess to deal with what basically boils down to text/numerical data. You could probably spend the rest of your life just writing parsers to consolidate different data formats. I truly don't believe healthcare will be solved by technology until there is a single ubiquitous format. It's really a problem of policy, and I won't purport to know the answer or who should be solving the issue, but I don't think it's ever going to be solved by one person at a keyboard.
There are standards such as HL7/FHIR, but in my experience, most companies incorrectly or partially implement the spec, and then it might as well be something else.