The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the federal deparment charged with oversight of all things health care, is the lynchpin to whom we might turn seeking information or leadership regarding the status of national initiatives to simplify the business of health care.

The good news is, DHHS does maintain a web page on this very subject.  The bad news is, I can paste the entire contents of that page below, and will only consume 31 words, including the DHHS office and title of the page. Basically, the state of simplification as reported by DHHS is two current links and a link to archives:

Office of the Assistant Secretary
for Planning and Evaluation

Administrative Simplification in the Health Care Industry

HIPAA Transactions, Code Sets, Security and Identifier Standards

HIPAA Health Information Privacy Standards

Archived Links 

You can view this DHHS page yourself at: http://aspe.hhs.gov/admnsimp/

Hopefully our community can provide more to the equation than our federal counterparts.