MUMPS, the Programming Language For Healthcare

citadrianne writes: An ICU patient is monitored and assessed according to 12 different variables. These include such measurements as body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygenation, blood pH, and others. Together, they're used to formulate a quantitative answer to the question, "How bad is it, doc?" Many of these physiological signs are measured in real-time via electrodes and like a billion different varieties of catheter. Add to it barrages of lab tests done multiple times per day per patient and the need for 20 or so clinicians (per patient) to have access to all of this data, and the result is very a deep data problem. Multiply that data problem by hundreds of thousands of patients.

This is the fundamental problem that the programming language MUMPS (sometimes called just "M"), or the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, aims to solve. To its proponents, MUMPS allows for a one of a kind synthesis of programming and database management, while to to its detractors, it's a bizarre anachronism with little connection to the evolution and innovation taking place elsewhere in programming. Probably to most people that do things with computers, MUMPS/M is poorly understood, at best, and more likely to be completely unknown.

Comments

Re:MUMPS, ancient and rarely used

[Registered Coward v2]

I have a doctor friend who, before becoming a doctor, was a CS grad. He's in his 50's now. When I told him we hired someone from Epic Systems that knew MUMPS, he exclaimed, "They still use that?! MUMPS was going out of style back when I was an undergrad!" I believe it is also still used in older banking/financial tools.

While MMR vaccine has pretty much eradicated MUMPS the anti-VAX crowd is big enough so that it still crops up in isolated populations.

Re:This MUMPS?

[nitehawk214]

Yeah, you would think Vax would get rid of MUMPS.

Must be those damn Anti-Vaxers.

Re:MUMPS, ancient and rarely used

[ValentineMSmith]

Actually, it's kind of the other way around in reverse. MUMPS is the database backend. Cache exists as an object oriented datastore that uses MUMPS. Cache also has a VB-ish scripting language that can be used for those that don't feel like parsing stuff that looks like

N X S X="^DIC(",X=$QS(@X)

Many (but not all) of my personality problems derive from supporting software written in MUMPS for the last 15 or so years.