This 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

This 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.