>I see things like this in healthcare constantly.

Cosign. I worked in healthcare for the better part of a decade and spent just over five years of that doing data interchange (mostly HL7).

It's always somewhat amusing when threads about it pop up on HN because it almost invariably winds up with smart programmers insisting that these have to be simple problems that would be easily solved if only we were using the right API, while having zero understanding of the business and regulatory requirements that, in reality, make many of the things attached to it very difficult to get right in a field where you literally have the potential of killing somebody with a severe enough mistake.