谷歌与美国的医疗系统合作了一个大项目，结果跌破了眼镜。

这个系统时至今日居然还在用传真机来共享信息，简直离网络时代差了几个世纪，算是石器时代了。

而且没办法，谷歌这个全球最大的互联网公司之一，还得迁就他们用传真机的习惯。

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图片来源：视觉中国

Last year at the HIMSS health care conference, former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt noted that health care is still in the “stone age,” and is reliant on fax machines and pagers.

去年在美国医疗卫生信息与管理系统协会（HIMSS）的医疗保健大会上，前谷歌首席执行官兼董事长埃里克·施密特指出，医疗保健仍处于“石器时代”，依赖于传真机和传呼机。

Now, at the same conference in Orlando, Google seems to have acknowledged that the medical world’s stone age technology is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

现在，在奥兰多的同一个会议上，谷歌似乎已经承认，在可预见的未来，医学界的石器时代技术将继续存在。

At the company’s booth, attendees spotted a demo for a new health service that involves faxing medical information to Google Drive, the company’s cloud storage service.

在该公司的展位上，与会者看到了一项新健康服务的演示，该健康服务包括将医疗信息传真到谷歌云端硬盘上，即该公司的云存储服务。

That way, physicians have “hassle free” access to the information when they need it, according to marketing materials at the booth.

根据展位上的营销资料，这样一来，医生在需要的时候就可以“不受干扰”地获取信息。

A spokesperson for Google Cloud described the fax demo as a “prototype of the possibilities enabled by APIs and an open cloud platform.” In other words, while the product isn’t live yet, it’s an indicator of what’s to come from Google.

谷歌云的一位发言人将传真演示描述为“由应用界面（API）和开放云平台支持的可能性的原型”。换句话说，虽然这个产品还没有上线，但是它预示着谷歌的未来。

Google is competing with rivals Microsoft and Amazon to get its cloud service into the health care sector. One approach has involved standing out by pitching its advanced technology, like machine learning and artificial intelligence, which can be used to parse health data.

谷歌正与微软和亚马逊竞争，将它的云服务引入医疗保健领域。其中一种方法是突出自己的先进技术，比如机器学习和人工智能，它们可以用来分析健康数据。

None of that is possible if health data isn’t widely accessible. And these days, it’s still common for medical information to be shared by fax, rather than in a computer-readable format.

如果不能广泛获取健康数据，这些都是不可能的。如今，通过传真分享医疗信息，而不是通过计算机可读的格式，依旧很普遍。

There are a few reasons for that. For starters, there’s tradition. Some older doctors are comfortable with these technologies and don’t want to let them go.

这有几个原因。首先，这是传统。一些老医生习惯了用这些技术，不想让它们消失。

Faxes are also considered safe and secure under today’s federal privacy laws for doctors to transmit medical records.

根据今天的联邦隐私法，医生用传真传输病历的也被认为是安全可靠的。

今日语言点

1）Reliant adj.依赖性的

这个词表示“对……极为依赖”，用法是 be reliant on sth.

The hostel is heavily reliant upon charity.

这家收容所在很大程度上依赖慈善捐款。

2）Foreseeable adj.可预见的

不难看出，这个词是 fore + see + able

前缀 fore- 表示“在前”，see 就是“看”，而 able 表示“能”。

所以这个词的意思就是“可以提前看到”，也就是“可预见的”：

It seems to me that this crime was foreseeable and this death preventable.

在我看来，这起犯罪似乎是可预见的，而这次死亡事件是可避免的。

3）hassle free adj.无障碍的

Hassle 的意思是“麻烦”，而 sth. + free 这个结构表示“没有……的”

Smoke Free Area

无烟区