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I needed medical records from a hospital across town for a patient on my shift last night. Unit clerk called the hospital to request records. They then printed
by davycro 8y ago
I needed medical records from a hospital across town for a patient on my shift last night. Unit clerk called the hospital to request records. They then printed about 60 pages from their electronic record. Those pages were faxed to our department. Our unit clerk scanned the printed pages from our fax machine into our electronic record.
Some patient notes are a scan of a fax of a scan of a fax.
- _pastel 8y agoThis is a perfect explanation of why OCR of medical records is so difficult. As an engineer working on this, it's frustrating that the computer vision research community treats document OCR as a solved problem. New papers and competitions are exclusively in fancy settings, like slanted text outdoors on a busy street, or handwritten Urdu with only a small set of training labels. Meanwhile our medical data is locked up in a scan of a fax of a scan of a fax, with a mixture of printed text and handwritten notes, with table lines crossing the text. Paid services like Google's Cloud Vision API struggle at best, and the best available open source software (tesseract) isn't even close.
- lostlogin 8y agoI regularly deal with printed out referral forms that are photographs of the original with a steering wheel and traffic in the background.