VOA慢速英语2013 Health Report - Malawi Hospital Expands Use of Electronic Records

Health Report - Malawi Hospital Expands Use of Electronic Records

健康报道 - 马拉维医院扩大使用电子病历

From VOA Learning English, this is the Health Report in Special English.

这里是美国之音慢速英语健康报道。

Electronic medical records are not only for wealthy, industrialized countries. A test project in Southern Africa suggests that using computers to store medical information may also be a good investment in poor countries.

电子病历不仅仅针对富裕的工业化国家。南部非洲的一个试验项目表明，利用计算机储存医疗信息可能也是贫穷国家一种很好的投资。

Electronic medical records have been used for about ten years in Malawi to follow the progress of patients with HIV. Now the program is being expanded at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre. The program is called SPINE 1 – Surveillance Program of Inpatients and Epidemiology. It has three goals. The first is collecting basic information about patients’ medical problems. Dr. Miguel San Joaquin says the second goal is to look for changes in the health of all patients with HIV.

电子病历在马拉维已经使用了近十年，用于跟踪艾滋病患者的治疗进展。现在该项目扩大到了布兰太尔的伊丽莎白女王中心医院。它被称为SPINE--住院病人流行病学监测项目。该项目有三个目标。第一个目标是搜集病人病情的基本信息。米格尔·圣华金（Miguel San Joaquin）医生表示，第二个目标是探寻所有艾滋病患者的健康变化。

“For example, there are issues like how are antiretrovirals working. Are certain diseases like pneumonia 2 going down because of the introduction of new vaccines 3, and so on and so forth 4.”

他说，“举例来说，像抗逆转录病毒药物如何作用等问题。以及肺炎一类疾病是否因为新疫苗的引进而减少等等。”

Dr. San Joaquin says the third goal is to help individual patients directly. Patients receive clearly printed information when they leave the hospital so they understand how to take their medicine and what they should do next. This paper is included in a document called a health passport and replaces handwritten instructions that patients received in the past.

圣华金医生表示，第三个目标是直接帮助患者个人。患者在离开医院时获得清晰打印出来的信息，这样他们就知道该如何服药以及接下来怎么办。这张纸包含在一个被称为健康护照的文档中，用来取代过去的手写医嘱。”

“Now there is a very neat and clear prescription 5 on a piece of paper that is attached inside their health passport for their benefit.”

他说，“现在为了病人，处方被整洁、清晰地打印到纸上并附到他们的健康护照上。”

The electronic information also gives health officials new tools to deal with outbreaks of disease or other health emergencies.

这类电子信息也为卫生官员处理疾病爆发或其它突发公共卫生事件提供了新的工具。

There are some challenges that make it difficult to use electronic medical records more widely. Dr. San Joaquin says it takes time to put information into a computer. Electricity often fails and so do computers. It also costs about $200,000 to start an electronic records program. For the hospital in Malawi, those costs were covered by donations from Europe.

一些挑战使得难以更广泛地使用电子病例。圣华金医生表示，将信息输入电脑需要一定时间，经常停电导致电脑无法使用。另外启动一个电子档案项目需要花费20万美元。对马拉维的这家医院来说，这些费用来自欧洲的捐款。

The United Nations Global Strategy for Women and Children’s Health has a goal of saving the lives of 16 million mothers and children in 75 target countries by 2015. All of these target countries have been directed to include electronic records and other information technology in their national health care systems.

联合国全球妇女和儿童健康战略设定了一个到2015年在75个目标国家挽救1600万名妇女儿童的目标。所有这些目标国家都被要求将电子病例和其它信息技术囊括到他们的全国卫生保健系统中。