Interesting issue with Scotland's trace app reading through walls.
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Many years back I wrote code for a central London hospital and part of the code was to share data with health authorities about patient episode and appointments so to "collect" moneys from them (all "funny" money - we didn't really bill them like that).
Each year the government would issue out details of what data to supply and in what format and each year I would rewrite our reporting software (and maybe some collection in the main patient system) to match the requirement.
In April we would run the old code for the March data plus an optional annual rollup (Apr-Mar). The data would be in a known format (column width) with data items encoded to NHS standards (it was anonymised - only wanted the basics like gender, race, age, diagnosis codes, treatment codes etc). We would also update the patient system to collect any new data.
In May we would now run the new version of the reporting software and send out the new format files to the health authorities and would always get plaintive requests for the old format as they weren't ready yet. We couldn't because we were often now collecting data differently and our coding team was me for much of the time and I had other tasks to get on with.
The point is that what should have happened is that the NHS would tell the labs to provide data in their format and then make it easy to parse into the NHS database.
I'm wondering if the labs are all using their own formats or something and Excel parsing is being used as a quick way to get the data consistent. Much better for the parsing to be done by the labs as the volumes are lower then make it easier just to read into the central database.