The first time I ever heard of M (or MUMPS) was when I got in touch with a gal I used to work with and went to high school with. This was in the 2000's, I think. She had not been a stellar student and had struggled with BASIC in the programming class I met her in. Lo and behold, she was an M programmer for a hospital down in Florida.

 

My daughter worked for EPIC as her first job out of college. They sell the most widely used software that automates information handling in the medical field. They employ an army of thousands of support people to help medical facilities adopt and use the software. My daughter (and many others) left after a while because there's very little advancement out of that army.

I didn't know until I just looked it up: Epic is in fact based on MUMPS.

 

https://www.danielscrivner.com/epic-systems-business-breakdown/

The first product wasn't even electronic health records. It was scheduling software for a single doctor's office, written in MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), a programming language so obscure that most programmers have never heard of it. Faulkner sold it for $5,000 to a local physician. The margin was terrible. But Faulkner noticed something: the doctor didn't just want scheduling. He wanted billing. Then he wanted patient records. Then he wanted lab results.

Here's something that shouldn't exist: A software company that controls the medical records of 78 percent of Americans—255 million people—yet has never gone public, never taken venture capital beyond the original $70,000, and operates from a fantasy-themed campus in Verona, Wisconsin, population 14,000.

Epic Systems generates an estimated $4.9 billion in annual revenue with software margins in an industry that typically runs on service margins. They maintain near-100 percent customer retention in a market where switching vendors is common. They've built what's effectively a monopoly without the typical monopolist playbook—no acquisitions, no predatory pricing, no regulatory capture. Well, mostly no regulatory capture.
...
And in healthcare, nobody ever got fired for buying Epic.

 

You can tour the campus and I highly recommend it if you're ever in the area.

The company summer picnic was NOT to be missed: Lobster and steak plus everything else you'd expect from a summer picnic in Wisconsin. I've never thrown cow chips before or since.

 

For a while in the 80s Pick and MUMPS systems were a large part of my yearly income working as a generalist consultant to "captitated health care" shops.

Pick because Dick Pick's (I am not making that up) hashed OTP systems, that used Pick BASIC and an operating system that couldn't partition disk space (every added spindle was just more hash space) would at some point always reach a threshold where batch exceeded the time available to run. (That is, from Friday at 1700 to Monday at 0900).

MUMPS because some shops were moving to Windows NT based systems and that was too new.

The MUMPS shops were universally more capable than the Pick shops.

 

https://www.danielscrivner.com/epic-systems-business-breakdown/


Here's something that shouldn't exist: A software company that controls the medical records of 78 percent of Americans—255 million people—yet has never gone public, never taken venture capital beyond the original $70,000, and operates from a fantasy-themed campus in Verona, Wisconsin, population 14,000.

Epic Systems generates an estimated $4.9 billion in annual revenue with software margins in an industry that typically runs on service margins. They maintain near-100 percent customer retention in a market where switching vendors is common. They've built what's effectively a monopoly without the typical monopolist playbook—no acquisitions, no predatory pricing, no regulatory capture. Well, mostly no regulatory capture.
...
And in healthcare, nobody ever got fired for buying Epic.

From wikipedia

Additionally, this effort to maximize profits allegedly led providers using Epic to spend two hours entering data for every hour they spend with patients, including significant time outside of working hours. Based on interviews with providers, much of this data is clinically irrelevant. Critics have also suggested that while Epic provides time-saving tools, these are attempts to solve problems also exacerbated by Epic.

 

Blast from the past on the Pick BASIC reference.

It's still kicking.
https://mypickcloud.com/

"By leveraging and embracing new technologies, we can preserve and rejuvenate what my father started,” said Mark Pick, president and CEO of Pick Cloud, in a statement released by the company, referring to Dick Pick, who along with Don Nelson, is widely credited as being a founding father of MultiValue software'

 

Additionally, this effort to maximize profits allegedly led providers using Epic to spend two hours entering data for every hour they spend with patients, including significant time outside of working hours. Based on interviews with providers, much of this data is clinically irrelevant. Critics have also suggested that while Epic provides time-saving tools, these are attempts to solve problems also exacerbated by Epic.

A similar complaint could be made about every database installation. I love what you can accomplish with a good database but the time spent programming, customizing and fixing all the crap data is quite significant.

 

A similar complaint could be made about every database installation. I love what you can accomplish with a good database but the time spent programming, customizing and fixing all the crap data is quite significant.

So true, GIGO, as true today as it was in 1950 !