VA's Baker: No wholesale dumping of MUMPS

As the Veterans Affairs Department sorts through responses to a request for information on the viability of open source software as a component of the VistA electronic health record architecture, it's also making clear that the MUMPS programing language will continue to underpin VistA in the near term.

VA chief information officer Roger Baker released an August 30 statement noting that the VA's current health information technology system, the VA Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, known as VistA, contains more than 15 million lines of code written in MUMPS.

"I just don't see us deciding to re-code all of that in another language right away," Baker said. "One question I had was how well modules written in other languages will interface with MUMPS code, but lots of folks have weighed in to assure me that it is not a significant issue," he added.

"So, I would expect an Open Source VistA system to evolve over time as people chose the language they prefer to write new functionality," Baker concluded.

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