The Mumps Programming Language

An introduction to the Mumps Programming Language including programming examples.Mumps (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-programming System) is a general purpose programming language environment that provides ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable) database access by means of program level subscripted arrays and variables. The Mumps database allows schema-less, key-value access to disk resident data organized as trees that may also be viewed as sparse multi-dimensional arrays.Beginning in 1966, Mumps (also referred to as M), was developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) on a PDP-7, the same architecture on which Unix was being implemented at approximately the same time. Because of its simplicity, low cost and ease of use, Mumps quickly became popular and established itself as the basis for many medical applications. COSTAR (COmputer-STored Ambulatory Record), for example, was a medical record, fiscal management and reporting system, developed in the mid-1970s for use in ambulatory care settings and it was widely used worldwide.Today, Mumps programs are employed extensively in financial and clinical applications. If you've been to a doctor, been seen at a hospital, or used an ATM machine, your data has probably been processed by a Mumps program.Mumps programs are the basis of the U.S. Veterans Administration's computerized medical record system VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture), the largest of its kind in the world. VistA is a collection of 80 different software subsystems that support the largest medical records system in the United States. It supports the medical records of over 8 million veterans, is used by 180,000 medical staff at 163 hospitals, more than 800 clinics, and 135 nursing homes.Mumps is used by many health care organizations including Allscripts, Epic, Coventry Healthcare, EMIS, Partners HealthCare (including Massachusetts General Hospital), MEDITECH, GE Healthcare (formerly IDX Systems and Centricity), Sunquest Information Systems, DASA, Quest Diagnostics, and Dynacare, among others. Some of the largest and most well known hospitals use Mumps based electronic health records systems. These include Kaiser Permanente, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Medicine Hospitals, UCLA Health, Texas Health Resources, Massachusetts General Hospital, Mount Sinai Health System in New York City and the Duke University Health System. Among financial institutions, it is used by Ameritrade, the Bank of England, and Barclays Bank, as well as others.The main features: (1) Mumps supports a hierarchical and multi-dimensional database model. When viewed as a tree, database nodes can be addressed as path descriptions in a manner which is easy for a novice programmer to master in a relatively short time. Alternatively, the database can be viewed as sparse, n-dimensional matrices of effectively unlimited size; (2) Mumps includes an extensive library of built-in string manipulation operators and functions; (3) Mumps runs on inexpensive, commodity servers and is easily scaled as demand grows; (4) Mumps can handle Big Data quantities of information that are beyond the capabilities of many RDBMS systems with very high levels of performance and throughput; (5) Mumps is easily managed without the need for database administrators; (6) Mumps databases are ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) Compliant.

Kevin C. O'Kane is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of an open source Mumps Compiler and Interpreter as well as more than 40 published papers in computer science with an emphasis on biomedical informatics.