The Veterans Administration (today known as the United States Department of Veterans Affairs) officially adopted MUMPS as the programming language to be used to implement an integrated laboratory / pharmacy / patient admission, tracking and discharge system in the early 1980s. The original version, the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP) was delivered early and under budget. DHCP has been continuously extended in the years since. Most of the source code is available at no cost under the Freedom of Information Act. However, a major module, IFCAP (Integrated Funds Distribution, Control Point Activity, Accounting and Procurement) is not available to the general public (but is to hospitals) because it contains certain validation routines and accounting information that could be used for fraud. Before implementing DHCP, the VA also wrote an intermediate layer known as FileMan in MUMPS to act as a database management system. VA then hired SAIC to do a 2 pilot projects of converting the MUMPS into a Java/web based solution, but the VA managed its money so poorly that the government removed funding opportunies. One pilot was successful, with 100% transformation converting MUMPS to Java and web-enabling it, including FileMan. This pilot is open source and can be aquired at VA.

Today, DHCP is known as Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA). The Hardhats.org website is the center for the international community of VistA developers and users and also serves something of the same function for MUMPS generally.

In the late 1980's the Department of Defense decided to implement a next-generation healthcare information system for the active military. The contract was awarded to SAIC, which developed the Composite Health Care System (CHCS). Rather than starting from scratch, SAIC started with DHCP and built on it. At this time, IBM decided to enter the market. Rather than develop its own MUMPS implementation it licensed the Micronetic's implementation. However, despite a lot of hype in the MUMPS community, IBM remained interested mainly in selling hardware. Tandem followed the same path, using the Micronetics implementation on its machines.

Nearly the entire VA hospital system in the United States and the Indian Health Service, as well as major parts of the Department of Defense CHCS hospital system all still run the system for clinical data tracking.