That, for want of a better word is absolutely incredible. I keep using that word and I think I know what it means but really, what were they smoking?
MUMPS (har har) has it's origins in the medical world so there are a lot more people versed in mumps in that world that have domain expertise regarding hospitals but you'd hope that that chapter of the Cambrian explosion in programming was closed by now and that someone would come to their senses and would say: absolutely no more new development in MUMPS. (And 'Mapper' for that matter.)
They were dead-ends 30 years ago, they're not magically going to be better in 2015. Of course it would be hard to get rid of 1.8B euros using any other available technology so maybe that's were we can find part of the answer of why this happened.
Maintaining MUMPS code is an interesting exercise in pasta consumption, the language more or less dictates it.
A co-worker's son had the offer of a summer 2015 internship with a big US insurer. The system he would have worked on had a VB (maybe VB.NET) front end to a MUMPS system. He did not take the job, for something that seemed more useful came up.
Good luck with that. MUMPS is an interesting beast. Before you embark on that I suggest you look into some medium sized MUMPS based project to get an idea of the kind of flavor of madness you'll be engaging.
But I agree with you that if you can pull this off you'll be doing well financially.
Even better: a MUMPS -> Java automatic translator (or maybe Python or Ruby, but I think the Java would be an easier sell in that market).
One of my worst experiences was working for some bank that used MUMPS and trying to recover the (accidentally) erased editor string before someone would notice that it was gone. (Yes, the editor is a string, and it behaves just like any other string and globals are auto persisted to disk so if you wipe the editor string then much good luck to you.)
Banks and healthcare share a number of elements one of which is large budgets and those peddling MUMPS and associated (expensive consultancy) services saw an opportunity and ran with it. The fact that it eats up your hardware probably didn't go unnoticed and I'm pretty sure that in that world 'kickback' isn't a dirty word.
