US Veterans Affairs hits brakes on $10b Oracle Cerner health record system The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) this week announced it is delaying pending deployments of the Oracle Cerner electronic health record (EHR) system until June 2023 because of ongoing problems with the system. "Right now, the Oracle Cerner electronic health record system is not delivering for Veterans or VA health care …
I wonder what happened to their previous system? https://worldvista.org/ -- VistA an open-source EHR developed by the VA and widely deployed. From my understanding, this system already was and is fully functional, maintainable, and upgradeable. I recall reading about a VA effort years back to get some kind of data interchange standard between the medical record vendors, this ultimately failed (this market has about the highest level of vendor lockin I've seen anywhere and that's how they like it), so VistA then gained support to import/export from/to a slew of systems so they can interchange with other hospitals.
Edit: Oh dear. never mind. It's written in MUMPS (EPIC's EHR is also written in MUMPS), so really it is more like a healthcare equivalent of having something that works but it's written in like FORTRAN 66 or COBOL, I suppose I could see wanting to modernize things at that point.
A lot of medical systems used to be written in MUMPS. The language was even invented at a hospital. I always thought that its built-in key-value data store was the coolest part. A person at a contract support agency once told me that having MUMPS on your resume could get you jobs because of all the legacy systems written in it and people do not bother learning it any more.
Wonderful database. Like an infinitely recursive Perl hash of hashes.
But a godawful language lots of single character operators plus goths.
You can get a Java wrapper so you only have to deal with the get set and commit operators.
Incidentally it is widely used by Dutch banking group ING. Their core banking system is resold by FIS under the Profile brand and it’s the fastest most flexible core banking product you will ever come accross.
One of the developers of the Digital Standard Mumps software for the VAX line of computers told me that the reason MUMPS could not use hardware floating point for numbers was its use in the banking industry. It had to be able to represent large values with a lot of significant digits with no rounding or "just off a little bit" effects like 1.9999999 when you meant 2.0. So they had to invent their own internal number format.
You didn't HAVE to use those one-character names. That was a holdover from when MUMPS was strictly an interpreted text language running on small hardware. Modern MUMPS systems compile into an intermediate form.
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