Read unreadable: Google creates a service to decipher the handwriting of doctors

Google is working on a specialized AI-powered image processing tool to help pharmacists parse doctors' terrible handwriting. Gizmodo.

Photo: IStock

The tech giant is working on an AI tech tool to decipher hard-to-read handwritten medical prescriptions, as announced Dec. 19 at the annual Google India conference and described in блоге company.

This feature will become part of the Google Lens App Library. Lens can already rate, copy and paste real-life handwriting onto your phone or computer and automatically suggest supporting context and information based on that text using its search capabilities. The developed recipe decoding tool will work in a similar way. Users will be able to take or upload a photo of a doctor's note, and then the Lens app will process the image, detect the listed medications, and automatically suggest information about those medications.

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This may seem like a small step for Google Lens, which technically should have been reading doctor's prescriptions all this time, just like any other text. However, the doctor's handwriting is indeed worse than most people's. Plus, the stakes are much higher when digitizing a recipe than when translating a handwritten grocery list into a text note on your phone.

Handwritten prescriptions can lead to treatment errors, where pharmacists inevitably make mistakes when trying to decipher cryptic scribbles. And often the prescriptions themselves are imperfect from the very beginning - they lack important information for the patient.

Hastily drafted medical prescriptions have been a known problem for a long time, and this isn't the first time technology has tried to solve it. About 20 years ago, pharmacy chains in the United States began testing electronic scripts (that is, online prescription systems) to completely eliminate pen and paper. And in many cases, electronic prescriptions have become the norm.

According to MD analysis Toolbox, all but 10 states have a current, pending or future book law requiring health care providers to use electronic scripts. In some states, such as New York, failure to comply with this requirement can result in fines or even jail time. And the federal government is also requiring doctors who routinely prescribe controlled substances to Medicare patients to ditch handwritten prescriptions in favor of digital prescriptions in most cases.

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However, handwritten notes still persist in the US and are the dominant form of prescription elsewhere in the world. And in India, where Google is testing the feature, there are many barriers to digitization.

Google cited the unfinished product as the most useful for pharmacists and indicated that the experience of a pharmacist also plays a key role in learning and developing new technology. In the video, a company executive showed the audience the method a pharmacist used to identify key points on a doctor's note.

However, the technology is not quite ready for use by doctors yet. “While the initial results were encouraging, there is still a lot of work to be done before this system is ready for the real world,” said Manish Gupta, director of research at Google India, at the presentation.

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And the company says the recipe feature is not meant to replace human understanding. “It will be an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents, but the decision will not be made solely on the basis of the results provided by this technology,” the company said in a statement.

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