Healthcare systems heading to waiting room
August 10, 2011
Bruce Conrad, a longtime HP 3000 developer working at Dell's Services group which was formerly Perot Systems, provided a check-up on the Amisys apps he's supporting for US clients. Oracle is making a beachhead at the 3000 shop, where Conrad works on an EDI claims system. It's been a long transition, but that 3000 will be making its transition before too much longer.
"Amisys is still the heart of the system, but it'll be headed to God's waiting room soon," Conrad said. "I'm sure the HP3000 will still be around for a while. We have so many feeds/extracts going in and out that it's going to take a while to dismantle them."
Conrad says the transition to Oracle Health Insurance is still underway, and will be for some time. "I think we are doing some major migrations soon, though. I haven't seen the app yet, but we use Oracle's database, eBusiness, FMS and other stuff, so we're becoming a big Oracle shop.
"We have many Windows apps/servers, but the heavy stuff is all on Linux, with some other big processes on the HP 9000/HP-UX," Conrad said. "But that is gradually being migrated to Linux as well."
The Dell Services team did a lot with Perl, "but I think we're mostly moving to Java + Groovy, and who knows what else." Groovy is an object-oriented programming language for the Java platform. It's a dynamic language with features similar to those of Python, Ruby and Perl. Ruby never made it to the HP 3000, but Python and Perl were ported to MPE/iX by volunteers during the 1990s. Not with enough customer attraction to ensure HP's support of those languages on MPE/iX, however.