It may surprise you that the world’s first hospital‑wide medical information system MIS-I (pronounced "MIS One") was pioneered in Silicon Valley by defense contractor Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in partnership with El Camino Hospital. This accomplishment is being recognized with the dedication of an IEEE Milestone plaque at El Camino Hospital on Thursday, May 14th.

From one hospital in 1974 to two hundred in the late1990s and still installed at a few installations as late as 2020, MIS-I proved what a true systems‑engineering approach could accomplish in healthcare. It let physicians and staff across all departments access patient data and enter work orders electronically, eliminating handwritten versions and thereby reducing costs, improving safety, and laying the foundation of modern medical informatics.

MIS-I and its successive embodiments were treated the way Lockheed treated spacecraft: as an integrated system. Working side‑by‑side with the hospital’s clinical staff, teams designed and configured each system in a way no competitor matched then and perhaps even now. That collaboration led Lockheed to a number of inventions, including:

• A systems architecture that enabled near instantaneous response using 1970s IBM mainframe computers.
  
  
• The light-pen controlled Video Matrix Terminal, a practical solution to the user‑interface problems of the era when staff couldn’t type fast enough, and the mouse was not available as a tool.
   
• Matrix Programming (also known as Matrix Coding), a language that allowed screens to be created for clinical use without reprogramming the system.

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