Manish Gupta, research director, Google Research India, calls the humble prescription a “ubiquitous building block upon which much of public and private healthcare rests.” In a blog post, Gupta said that while these often tend to be handwritten and are hard to read, the information is important for both patients and their healthcare providers, for early diagnosis or self-management.
Gupta in the blog post also said that Google has had the technology to interpret text from images for decades now but prescriptions were different. “Ironically, what makes prescriptions hard for computers to digitise is the same thing that makes them hard for you and me to read — they’re unstructured, in shorthand, and full of clues for pharmacists to decipher.”
Using AI to make it easier to read prescriptions
At the India for Google 2022 event, Google announced a state-of-the-art AI and machine learning model that can identify and even highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions. “This will act as an assistive technology for digitising handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however, no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology,” said Gupta in the blog post.
How will the feature work?
It is not clear and Google didn’t really elaborate on the rollout plan of the feature. “While this system is currently under development, we look forward to sharing more updates on its broader rollout,” noted Gupta in the blog post.
