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Meet MUMPS, the Archaic Health-Care Programming Language That Predicted Big Data

vice.com · 1,593 words · saved by 1 readers

The human body is an endless stream of numbers, from brain waves to blood cells to whatever else you can imagine or secrete, and most of those numbers are changing all of the time. You might even say that its potential for quantification, for producing raw data, is limitless—making that data useful, however, is a different matter entirely. An ICU patient is monitored and assessed according to 12 different variables. These include such measurements as body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygenation, blood pH, and others. Together, they're used to formulate a quantitative answer to the question, "How bad is it, doc?" Many of these physiological signs are measured in real-time via electrodes and like a billion different varieties of catheter. Add to it barrages of lab tests done multiple times per day per patient and the need for 20 or so clinicians (per patient) to have access to all of this data, and the result is very a deep data problem. Multiply that data problem by hundreds of thous

Share: Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share using Native tools Share Copied to clipboard The human body is an endless stream of numbers, from brain waves to blood cells to whatever else you can imagine or secrete, and most of those numbers are changing all of the time. You might even say that its potential for quantification, for producing raw data, is limitless—making that data useful, however, is a different matter entirely. An ICU patient is monitored and assessed according to 12 different variables . These include such measurements as bo

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