经济学人下载:科技公司和医疗保健 头文字云

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？

About time we caught up with the digital age, eh, nurse?
我们是时候追赶数字时代了，对吧，护士？

ALTHOUGH most rich countries, and some leapfrogging poor ones like India,
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，

are adopting electronic medical records, doctors' surgeries in America still mostly do things the old-fashioned way.
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。

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.
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。

Aneesh Chopra, the White House's chief technology officer, says the promise of this money is already boosting investment.
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，

The big tech firms have convinced themselves that the health industry will be the next to embrace cloud computing.
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;
原则上讲，把医疗记录放到云里是有其意义的。

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.
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。

Doctors' surgeries, hospitals and patients would all be able to retrieve and manipulate the data remotely, over the internet.
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。

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.
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.
但是，存在一些质疑也是合理的。

A scheme to computerise the medical records of every patient in England has turned into a spectacularly expensive fiasco.
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。

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.
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。

The danger is that America's health services have foisted upon them whatever the industry has to sell, rather than what is needed.
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.
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。

Jonathan Bush, the boss of athenahealth, which uses the cloud to digitise health firms' administrative systems, calls the medical industry anti-innovation.
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。

He reckons the average American doctors' surgery still handles 1,000 faxes a day.
他估算到，平均每天，美国医生的诊疗室仍需处理1000份传真。

Keeping patient records secure and private is another big concern.
另一个重要考量，是确保病患病历的安全和隐私。

But PWC, a consultancy, says some firms are finding solutions to this,
但普华永道咨询公司认为，一些公司正在为此寻找解决之道，

developing secure cloud-computing systems that can be tailored to different countries' laws on the privacy of health data.
利用发展云计算系统的安全性能，针对不同国家在法律上规定的医疗数据隐私权，系统能做到量体裁衣。

The best reason to set aside such doubts and hope that cloud computing will take off in health care comes from the bottom up.
最给力的支持来自底层，人们将这些质疑搁置一边，希望云计算能运用于医疗保健中。

Richard Escue of RehabCare, a chain of rehabilitation centres, was sceptical at first,
一家连锁康复中心RehabCare集团的Richard Escue起初也对此质疑，

but found that the unstoppable popularity of iPhones and other smart mobile devices among staff,
但发现iPhone和其他智能移动设备在职员当中有不可挡的流行趋势，

and their demands to be able to send and receive health data on them,
而且职员们要求能够在iPhone和移动设备上收发医疗数据，

forced his IT team to embrace a cloud-connected set of mobile devices.
这便迫使他的IT小组在移动设备上附加了云连接的设备。

Stephen Herrod of VMware, a big cloud-computing firm, says the surging popularity of smartphones, tablets and other hand-held gadgets plus the government push for digitisation add up to an unstoppable force that will help firms like his overcome all the obstacles.
大型云计算公司威睿的Stephen Herrod说，智能手机、平板电脑和其他掌上配件的流行浪潮,再加上政府对数字化的推进，这些合起来，会形成不可挡的助力，帮助像他这样的公司克服一切困难。

If so, the slow, inefficient health-care industry will enjoy faster transmission and smarter analysis of data, and better diagnoses. Doctors, nurses and, above all, patients, will benefit.
如果是这样，迟钝低效的医疗保健行业将享受到更快的数据传送和更灵敏的数据分析，以及更好的诊断。医生、护士、病人，和所有相关公司、部门，都将从中受益。