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Page: Major Users of MUMPS Applications
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Veterans Administration and Department of Defense
The Veterans Administration (now called the United States Department of Veterans Affairs) officially adopted MUMPS as the programming language to be used while implementing an integrated laboratory / pharmacy / patient admission, tracking and discharge system in the early 1980s. The original version, the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP) was delivered early and under budget. DHCP has been continuously extended in the years since. Most of the source code is available at no cost. However, one module, "IFCAP" (Integrated Funds Distribution, Control Point Activity, Accounting and Procurement) is not available to the general public, though it's available to hospitals, because of a potential for fraud. It contains validation routines and accounting structures which could be misused. Before implementing DHCP, the VA also wrote an intermediate layer in MUMPS, FileMan, to function as a database management system. The VA hired SAIC to do two pilot projects, converting the MUMPS code into a Java/web based solution, but the project was mismanaged and was cancelled. One of the pilots was completed, converting the MUMPS code to functionally equivalent Java while web-enabling it, including FileMan. This pilot is open source and can be acquired from the VA.
Today, DHCP is known as Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA). The Hardhats.org website is the center for the international community of VistA developers and users and also serves something of the same function for MUMPS generally.
In the late 1980's, the Department of Defense decided to implement a next-generation healthcare information system for the active military. The contract was awarded to SAIC, which developed the Composite Health Care System (CHCS). Rather than starting from scratch, SAIC started with DHCP and built on it. About the same time, IBM decided to enter the healthcare software market. Rather than develop its own MUMPS version, it licensed Micronetic's implementation. However, despite a lot of hype in the MUMPS community, IBM remained interested primarily in selling hardware. Tandem followed the same path, using the Micronetics implementation on its machines.
Nearly the entire VA hospital system in the United States and the Indian Health Service, as well as major parts of the Department of Defense CHCS hospital system all still run the system for clinical data tracking.
Other companies currently using MUMPS are: AmeriPath (http://www.AmeriPath.com), Care Centric (http://www.CareCentric.com), Team Health (http://www.TeamHealth.com) and EMIS (http://www.emis-online.com/).
[edit] Other industries
MUMPS also gained an early following in the financial sector, and MUMPS applications are still in use at many banks and credit unions.
As of 2005 most use of M is either in the form of GT.M or Cache' (software). The latter is being aggressively marketed by InterSystems and is having some success in penetrating new markets, such as telecommunications.
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