Adopter Details

German Heart Institute

The German Heart Institute in Berlin is a hospital specialized in cardio-thoracic surgery and cardiology. In 1992 it started adding DHCP modules to its existing MUMPS-based Hospital Information System. Meanwhile KERNEL became the framework for its HIS. The hospital is now running Lab, Record Tracking, Parts of Blood Bank, and Anatomic Pathology, in addition to internally-developed applications using FileMan and ScreenMan.

Marcus Werners reports:

The problems I encountered during that time were: Convincing IRM management and collegues (mostly with "classic" computer science background), that MUMPS and applications written in MUMPS were not based an exotic our dying technology. Showing the functionality and speed of development, it was much easier to convince users and hospital mangement. Gaining and keeping management support is an ongoing effort!

On the technology side, the [natural] language issues were the hardest to overcome. Fortunately the VA (i.e. the San Francisco ISC) was very helpful in this respect. FileMan and Kernel now contains code that allows different languages (prompts, date formats, date input) to coexist on the same machine.

In bringing up Lab, which meant automating our Lab for the first time, we were able to invite two people from San Francisco to help us and these two weeks made a tremendous difference and were a lot of fun. To train our developers in FileMan we brought Greg Kreis to Berlin for two one-week training sessions and that worked very well.

Plans for the future include complete Blood Bank, Radiology, OERR... If I ever find time I would like to do a multi-language MailMan.

Marcus fails to mention that he himself devoted many unpaid days of work in San Francisco and at home, to helping the VA implement the multi-language capabilities found in the most recent versions of FileMan.