Backend is all MUMPS. Frontend was for a long time coded in Visual Basic 6.
VB6/MUMPS stack is... not ergonomic to code in.
Epic is easy to hate (it's everywhere), and for good reason. However, the alternatives are not obviously better unless there's been some radical innovation. There are definitely systems designed for a particular piece of a hospital (ex, ER, or labs, etc) that are probably better than Epic is, but when it comes to having one system for the entire hospital, they're all pretty bad.
The main problem is that the customer is not the nurses, it's the legal/financial/administrative side.
> The main problem is that the customer is not the nurses, it's the legal/financial/administrative side.
This. The reason my medical staff like me is that I fight for usability for them, and push back against legal when they make requests that aren't backed up by the regulations. Legal hates me for the same reason, I know the regs and I'm willing to fight them on it.
>Epic is easy to hate (it's everywhere), and for good reason. However, the alternatives are not obviously better unless there's been some radical innovation. There are definitely systems designed for a particular piece of a hospital (ex, ER, or labs, etc) that are probably better than Epic is, but when it comes to having one system for the entire hospital, they're all pretty bad.
Yeah, our org is on Cerner and there's excited talk around going to Epic in the future. People don't seem to understand that it's just going to be more of same in dealing with an old, monolithic system.
Did anyone think to make languages that compile to those? I imagine that it would make an incredible amount of sense for Epic, at its scale, to write the equivalent of Typescript to reduce errors and improve productivity. Or do they just not have any sort of dev tools/research department?
They built their MUMPS IDE themselves, and their change tracking / bug management system. And effectively the database code is also entirely written by Epic- the business logic and database are both written in MUMPS and live side-by-side.
So they have quite a lot on their plate when it comes to tooling. When I was there, there was a truly horrible attempt at a DSL for code-generation that would build database querying code, but I found it both unwritable and unreadable.
VB6/MUMPS stack is... not ergonomic to code in.
Epic is easy to hate (it's everywhere), and for good reason. However, the alternatives are not obviously better unless there's been some radical innovation. There are definitely systems designed for a particular piece of a hospital (ex, ER, or labs, etc) that are probably better than Epic is, but when it comes to having one system for the entire hospital, they're all pretty bad.
The main problem is that the customer is not the nurses, it's the legal/financial/administrative side.