5 ms·

Does Epic use MUMPS? I know a lot of professional nurses and the rancor around Epic is off the charts.

• Sniffnoy 7y ago
  Epic uses MUMPS, but a nurse would not typically be interacting with that side of it...
  • Forge36 7y ago
    As it should be. Why should companies brag about using SQL or Hadoop?
• snuxoll 7y ago
  Yes, as does Meditech. Both are horrible products to integrate with and they’re rather common in large hospital systems.
• roywiggins 7y ago
  Backend is all MUMPS. Frontend was for a long time coded in Visual Basic 6. VB6/MUMPS stack is... not ergonomic to code in. Epic is easy to hate (it's everywhere), and for good reason. However, the alternatives are not obviously better unless there's been some radical innovation. There are definitely systems designed for a particular piece of a hospital (ex, ER, or labs, etc) that are probably better than Epic is, but when it comes to having one system for the entire hospital, they're all pretty bad. The main problem is that the customer is not the nurses, it's the legal/financial/administrative side.
  • burnte 7y ago
    > The main problem is that the customer is not the nurses, it's the legal/financial/administrative side. This. The reason my medical staff like me is that I fight for usability for them, and push back against legal when they make requests that aren't backed up by the regulations. Legal hates me for the same reason, I know the regs and I'm willing to fight them on it.
    • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
      Happen to have an email I could send you? It's sigint security stuff you might want to look into. My email is jwconway at protonmail dot com.
  • btown 7y ago
    Did anyone think to make languages that compile to those? I imagine that it would make an incredible amount of sense for Epic, at its scale, to write the equivalent of Typescript to reduce errors and improve productivity. Or do they just not have any sort of dev tools/research department?
    • roywiggins 7y ago
      They built their MUMPS IDE themselves, and their change tracking / bug management system. And effectively the database code is also entirely written by Epic- the business logic and database are both written in MUMPS and live side-by-side. So they have quite a lot on their plate when it comes to tooling. When I was there, there was a truly horrible attempt at a DSL for code-generation that would build database querying code, but I found it both unwritable and unreadable.
  • rmtech 7y ago
    > VB6/MUMPS stack That sounds like a medical condition. And after looking into the MUMPS language, I can see why they named it after a disease!
  • JBlue42 7y ago
    >Epic is easy to hate (it's everywhere), and for good reason. However, the alternatives are not obviously better unless there's been some radical innovation. There are definitely systems designed for a particular piece of a hospital (ex, ER, or labs, etc) that are probably better than Epic is, but when it comes to having one system for the entire hospital, they're all pretty bad. Yeah, our org is on Cerner and there's excited talk around going to Epic in the future. People don't seem to understand that it's just going to be more of same in dealing with an old, monolithic system.
• Forge36 7y ago
  It does. The language predates no-sql though it hasn't been kept as up to date as C. It's a database language.