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Collaborative Medical Systems or CoMed was founded in 1978.Its first name was the MUMPS Collaborative. MUMPS is a computer language known for its value in the medical field for not having to set defined lengths of fields and therefore accommodating large text that are needed in health records. MUMPS stands for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi Programming System. The language was created in the Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital by [http://www.mghlcs.org/about/team/octobarnett#:~:text=Octo%20Barnett%20is%20the%20founder,In%201964%2C%20Dr.&text=From%20this%20project%2C%20the%20Laboratory%20of%20Computer%20Science%20was%20born. Dr. Octo Barnett]. Founders were Charles M. Cooper, Jerry Lerman, Saul Bloom and Marty Levin, all MIT graduates. Marianne Boswell and Kay MacDonald joined them in ownership later as partners. The company was best known for its electronic medical records system for anatomic pathology, called CoPath. Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital were development partners and Jon Morrow, MD, PhD (recently retired Chair of Pathology) led the collaboration from the Yale side. CoPath became the "gold standard" in anatomic pathology as academic medical centers replaced typewriters and word processors with a system where all data on patients was kept online and retrievable for both clinical and research needs. CoPath was used by Yale, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of Iowa, Washington University, UCLA, NYU, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mayo Clinic, University of Pittsburgh, Rush Presbyterian, Beth Israel (NY), to name some of the notable clients. Collaborative Medical Center also had products that supported clinical laboratories, medical billing, and a report writer widely used by the MUMPS system users.

In 1997, the company was sold to Dynamic Health Systems. At the time of the sale, the company employed 107 people and had the lion's share of academic medical center pathology departments as clients, as well as all US military hospital pathology departments. The next year Dynamic sold a copy of CoPath to Sunquest for them to sell within their laboratory client base. This distribution greatly widened the market share of the system. Over the years the two original CoPath and Sunquest CoPath's diverged, with the Sunquest copy serving community hospitals and the original continuing to be bought and installed in high end, academic medical centers. Later, Dynamic Health Systems was sold to Cerner, Corp. and the system continues to be live and supported in the US and around the world.