Comment by tsurba
2 years ago
The Finnish capital area gov bought the health system from Epic systems made with Mumps for ~500 million € around 5 years ago, despite every software professional saying they shouldn’t.
And just like predicted it’s utter dogpoo now that it’s being deployed, and has already caused a bunch of health hazards and people quitting due to its impossibly bad and confusing interface.
You can guess will it be cheap to fix it now, as it probably was delivered up to the waterfall spec, and there is that one company in the world that owns the code and can change the software.
Worst case of corruption I’ve seen, in a country where its a saying we don’t have corruption.
The same thing happened with the Epic implementation in Copenhagen (which might have been before Finland? I forget). But it also happened in Trondheim in Norway at the end of last year: everyone said it was a terrible idea, both technical and medical people, they did it anyways, and everything when straight to hell.
I knew Helseplattformen in Trondheim was an IT scandal, but holy cow, I didn't know they used MUMPS.
Its not a bad language once you get used to it and the ability of Cache to scale is past what I have seen with other database products. (I work on an EMR that also happens to use Cache and know some Epic people)
Edit; just going to link one of their docs https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?id=417&sso...
The bit about the best developers graduating to work on Visual Basic components had me thinking of Epic. And now they are mixing in web workflows a well. :-P
As a Finn living in USA, I got recruiting email from Epic at the time. I think they may have been scouting people who speak Finnish in USA to recruit them. I just searched my email and the position was called "Finnish Integration Engineer".
I didn't even entertain the idea; I was aware of Epic's reputation and their awful software. Not to mention I might have had to move to their state for the job.
Finland has some great programmers, why did they buy from Epic..
Because buying an off-the-shelf solution from an established American supplier sounds like it's going to be cheaper and better than starting from scratch. To some people at least.
These B2B transactions are about buying as much protection from responsibility/liability as you can. And possibly a couple more golf friends. Nothing to do with the quality of the software...
It definitely sounds better if it means some money/favours will be passed under the table to you or your friends.
Also in Finland we decided to buy off-the-shelf taxation software from American Gentax. I believe it has VB.net core.
Developing a new EHR from scratch that could be used in a modern healthcare system is a huge undertaking. Even a large team of great programmers would need at least several years to build something minimally acceptable.