4 ms·

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

• Kocrachon 6y ago
  Not sure how I feel about my medical information being handled by PHP...
  • gen220 6y ago
    This won't make you feel any better... Many healthcare systems are a COBOL-dialect all the way at the bottom. Some of these had PHP layers shimmed in, when the web became a thing. I've seen php scripts that shell out to .bat's, that interface with the COBOL engine. It's a mad world. For context, a large amount of healthtech software was written in the 80s (kind of like fintech, the difference is that there's no competitive advantage to having better technology in health). It's a minor miracle that anything works at all.
    • ch4s3 6y ago
      I showed someone from the Allscripts innovation group what I could do in an Elixir repl once, and his jaw hit the floor. Then I showed him how we wrote parsers. He said we'd never make it because we turned around new features too fast for anyone to trust us.
  • ch4s3 6y ago
    Haha, among the most popular EMR you'll find a snarl of Perl, PHP, VB, Mumps/M, C#, old Java, cobol, and several proprietary languages. There is a small number of people who die in the US every year do to medical mistakes attributable to software bugs.
  • zanderwohl 6y ago
    Would it make you feel better to know your PID is being stored in a database language where the only data type is strings, and there is an intrinsic command to interpret any string as code?