hoot72

MUMPS, a language, particular to a domain, made when such things were common …

MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), or alternatively M, is a programming language created in the late 1960s, originally for use in the healthcare industry.

a language with built-in storage support …

a “global array facility,” really a simple multidimensional DBMS.

The VA has MUMPS …

The US Veteran’s Administration was one of the earliest major adopters of the MUMPS language. … 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 run systems using MUMPS databases for clinical data tracking.

In fact, many of the largest Health-Care Systems have MUMPS-inside …

AmeriPath (now part of Quest Diagnostics), Care Centric, Team Health, Epic Systems Corporation, EMIS, Partners HealthCare, Meditech, and GE Healthcare (formerly IDX Systems and Centricity) …

In the 90’s, privately-held InterSystems swallowed up other MUMPS vendors and then made …

Caché … the world’s fastest object database … (which) stores data in multidimensional arrays capable of carrying hierarchically structured data.

Yep, multidimensional arrays, MUMPS-inside - though you won’t see MUMPS on the datasheets. Nor Array nor Hierarchal Database. Too old-school. And after all Hierarchical variables are similar to objects with properties in Object Oriented languages. Another bit of branding - InterSystems calls Caché post-relational though they make much of support for SQL.

But Caché proved popular. Many using plain-MUMPS upgraded, though Epic’s MUMPS system gained the mandatory SQL-access and Web interfaces through KB SQL.

Today, the notion of a domain-specific language and store seems perverse but, like that domain-specific protocol, HL7, MUMPS is all over health-care.