I just want to second Rob's message and support his effort in this initiative.
I'm a staff member of OSEHRA (the Open Source EHR Agent), http://osehra.org/ , and have been observing with concern the demographics of the M community. It is currently composed by developers who have decades of expertise on developing and maintaining highly complex and sophisticated systems, and these expert developers are not being surrounded by younger developers who can take the flag and continue supporting those systems and innovating on them. Many of these expert developers are now retiring, and if we don't renew the ranges of the community, we will have a crisis of maintaining large Health IT systems. Most of the healthcare information systems in the US run on MUMPS/M. This includes more than 121 hospitals and about 900 clinical facilities of the Veterans Administration, most of the hospitals of the Department of Defense, (that run on CHCS), hospitals of the Indian Health Service (IHS), as well as hospitals in the private sector that run EHR systems from Epic, GE/centricity, and McKesson. For example the Kaiser Permanente hospital system runs on Epic and therefore on MUMPS. More at: https://github.com/OSEHRA-Sandbox/open-source-databases-tutorial/blob/master/source/M/WhoUsesIt.rst Collectively, these are hundreds of hospital facilities, that deliver care to tens of millions of patients. Furthermore, given Government initiatives to promote the adoption of EHRs, there is a growing market, that implies a demand for thousands of developers who will be able to provide support services to these many hospitals. We have been trying to raise awareness about this issue in several posts at opensource.com http://opensource.com/health/12/2/join-m-revolution http://opensource.com/health/12/3/join-m-revolution%E2%80%94get-your-tools http://opensource.com/health/12/7/join-m-revolution-m-and-r-programming-languages and have several educational initiatives in universities, particularly at RPI and SUNY-Albany. https://github.com/SUNY-Albany-CCI https://github.com/SUNY-Albany-CCI/M-Tutorial https://github.com/SUNY-Albany-CCI/open-source-databases-tutorial https://github.com/OSEHRA-Sandbox/open-source-databases-tutorial/tree/master/source/M However, these initiatives are not scaling as fast as we need them to. That is, training 30 to 50 students a year, does not provide the thousands of developers that are desperately needed in this space. Rob's work on merging the strengths of Node.js with the capabilities of the M database, might be one of the most significant opportunities to modernize these ecosystem and revitalize it. While in the process creating thousands of jobs for Node.js developers. A great opportunity for young developers who, as Tim O'Reilly advises, are looking for "Working on Stuff that Matters": http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html Luis -- -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
