经济学人下载:美国的医疗记录数字化会是巨大商机吗?

Technology firms and health care
科技公司和医疗保健

Heads in the cloud
头文字“云”

Digitising America’s health records could be a huge business. Will it?
美国的医疗记录数字化会是巨大商机吗？

ALTHOUGH most rich countries, and some leapfrogging poor ones like India, are adopting electronic medical records, doctors’ surgeries in America still mostly do things the old-fashioned way. Determined to change this, the Obama administration has passed laws that will flood the health-care industry with $28 billion in subsidies over the next few years to persuade doctors and hospitals to go digital. Aneesh Chopra, the White House’s chief technology officer, says the promise of this money is already boosting investment. The big tech firms have convinced themselves that the health industry will be the next to embrace cloud computing.
尽管大多数富裕国家以及一些有着跳跃式发展的贫困国家，比如印度，都采用了电子病历，但在美国，医生们的诊疗室多数仍按传统方式运行。奥巴马政府决心改变这一现状，他通过了一项即将遍及卫生保健行业的法律，投放280亿美元的补贴，说服医院和医生在未来几年做到数字化（管理）。白宫的首席技术长官Aneesh Chopra宣称，（政府）对这笔资金的允若已经推动了投资，大型技术公司都确信，医疗行业将是下一个被纳入云计算的目标。

In principle, it makes sense to put health records into the “cloud”; the factories for mass-producing digital services that are the IT industry’s next big thing should be ideal places to store, maintain and process patient and clinical data. Doctors’ surgeries, hospitals and patients would all be able to retrieve and manipulate the data remotely, over the internet. Bridget van Kralingen, a senior executive at IBM, sees health care providing maybe one-tenth of the $7 billion in revenues her firm sees from cloud computing by 2015.
原则上讲，把医疗记录放到“云”里是有其意义的。IT行业的下一个大事件是，批量生产数字服务的工厂，应该是放置、存储并处理病患和诊所数据的理想场所。医生的诊疗室、医院和患者都将可以通过网络远程检索及操作这些数据。IBM的高级执行官Bridget van Kralingen预见到，截至2015年，她的公司将从云计算中获得70亿美元的利润，其中的十分之一有可能来自医疗保健服务。

But some scepticism is in order. A scheme to computerise the medical records of every patient in England has turned into a spectacularly expensive fiasco. Gartner, a technology consultancy, observes in a recent report that tech firms are rushing to rebrand their products with the latest “cloud” buzzword, “whether they actually are cloud offerings or not.” The danger is that America’s health services have foisted upon them whatever the industry has to sell, rather than what is needed.
但是，存在一些质疑也是合理的。英国使用计算机处理所有患者的病历，结果该计划变成了烧钱的无底洞。高德纳技术咨询公司在最近的一份报告中注意到，无论是否提供云服务，科技公司们都一窝蜂儿地用最近的热词“云”来重塑其品牌。危机之处在于，美国的医疗服务不追求行业需求，而是一味骗售自己提供的所有产品。

Another reason not to get too excited is the reflexive conservatism and technophobia of medical folk. Jonathan Bush, the boss of athenahealth, which uses the cloud to digitise health firms’ administrative systems, calls the medical industry “anti-innovation”. He reckons the average American doctors’ surgery still handles 1,000 faxes a day.
另一个让人不容乐观的原因，是下意识的保守主义和传统医学的技术恐惧。（医疗服务公司）athenahealth的老板Jonathan Bush称医疗行业是“反创新”，他的公司利用云技术将保健公司的行政管理系统数码化。他估算到，平均每天，美国医生的诊疗室仍需处理1000份传真。