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One of the major EHR systems used in the United States, VISTa, was developed by the Veteran's Administration and is open source. It's sufficiently successful that it's been adopted not just by other government agencies but a number of private hospitals. Most instances still seem to be based on a commercial M implementation, but some use the fully free GT.M stack

It's M based and in general not on the cutting edge of technology, but it's long service life has shown that it fits the need. I've worked with it once at the Indian Health Service and while not exactly Web 2.0 it is quite powerful and familiar to the staff there.



Just to provide an additional data point, a family member who is a physician and previously used this system before his workplace switched to one of the proprietary private alternatives still occasionally laments on how good it was in comparison.


M / Mumps is a terrible language / datastore to deal with however.


As a language user, it is really just a semi-structured assembly-style everything-is-string and global-memory as a hierarchical tree map.

The language comes with transaction support, though one can use mutexes instead for performance reasons.


The language is ... odd. For me, ... not good.

But the datastore itself reminds me of some of those early NoSQL object stores. It isn't JSON, but you can throw anything in there and get it back -- pretty efficiently!

It's hard to table-ize a lot of clinical data - at least with a standard/universal table. GT.M gives you a solid enterprise quality way to store "stuff".




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