Digital transformation is fundamentally changing almost all industries and their business models all over the world. To meet challenging digitization demands, businesses are relying on dedicated data conversion services. The healthcare sector is also undergoing significant changes with the arrival of innovative technologies such as medical imaging and advanced diagnostics. Though relatively nascent compared to that of other applications such as medical diagnostics and medical transcription, AI applications are also being used in healthcare document digitization.
AI-assisted Document Digitization in Healthcare
Machine vision is utilized in the healthcare industry for medical imaging and medical diagnostics. OCR, another application of machine vision is used to digitize physical documents and transfer the data into EHRs. OCR software can analyze images of a paper document from a camera and recognize characters and letters. It digitizes the information from the scanned document and allows the user to save it to a database for future use. This is useful for companies with huge volumes of data in physical form. In the healthcare industry, OCR technology helps to digitize document types including but not limited to:
- Patient reports containing clinical data or medical data
- Prescription slips or receipts for verifying patient medications
- Lab reports from clinical trials or other experiments
- Clinical trial information
In the USA, companies are familiar with scanning data from printed documents and transcribing the data into word processors by hand and they focus on staying up to date with the latest technology in digitization. However, AI technology must be used cautiously and document digitization using this technology should ideally be used only if the volume of documents is too high for manual transcription.
Physical documents are a resource for healthcare companies to compare the present clinical trial operations to improve their best practices. The medical records of patients including those from outside clinics and physicians are also valuable because they contain the healthcare details of patients. With accurate information regarding the patient’s condition, various medical interventions provided, allergy details and so on, providers can give the right medicine and treatment. Other important details include pharmacology experiment results, results from other medical studies etc. that may be recorded in lab notebooks. Such data must be digitized and saved to a database. Digitization can be done with the help of artificial intelligence assisted OCR software. Once digitized, new information can be added as and when it is available. The process involves data acquisition with the help of OCR technology and the documents are digitized. The digitized data is then processed so as to be readable by a machine learning model. Innovative AI software analyses the data and generates individual medical care summaries for each patient. These summaries can be effectively utilized to create predictive models to evaluate patient health risk.
OCR is Underdeveloped in the Healthcare sector
Document digitization is in its initial stage in the healthcare sector when compared to technologies like medical imaging, telepathology, and patient population segmentation. AI utilization in document digitization is quite rare. Moreover, vendors in the field have very little in terms of project funding and dedicated AI talent.
Document digitization remains relatively new compared to other data acquisition applications such as text miners and voice recognition note recorders due to the following reasons:
- The technology is considered as a transitionary tool
- In many cases, the technology requires multiple AI applications to fully use the captured data
- AI is not a fundamental requirement of accurate document digitization at this time
Many companies consider document digitization as a method of converting physical documents into digital data. Healthcare companies that already have a reliable digitization method may not choose to upgrade it with AI. A document is digitized when an OCR software recognizes all the typed characters and letters and saves them as a file. To leverage these files in a useful way, healthcare companies will have to use another AI application to analyze them.
Converting to a fully digital document system is a great choice for healthcare companies that rely on physical documents. Some organizations may be incapable of using this facility but this new technology offers an important value to healthcare networks. For a healthcare company, understanding and maintaining a machine learning model is ideal. Healthcare companies may also have various types of unstructured data that they want to leverage when using the solution, like PDF scans of medical documents etc.
Digitized healthcare documents improve staff productivity and quality of care. Incorporating AI may not be a compulsory measure for healthcare companies for providing accurate data. Human error is a challenge for almost all health companies and with document digitization high volume of data can easily digitized. This reduces the burden of medical documentation on physicians and improves patient satisfaction. With a dedicated provider of document conversion service, companies can easily turn their documents into digital format; and in the long run they could consider AI applications or wait for innovative OCR software for better results.
