Your doctor’s handwriting is garbled on prescriptions could soon be a thing of the past. The Google team is working on a possible solution.
At the moment, it is only a prototype, but it already lets us see what this new initiative from Google for the health sector is all about.
Google’s AI will be able to decipher doctors’ handwriting on prescriptions
Not understanding the doctor’s handwriting in prescriptions is already a classic. Although it is no more than funny for patients, it becomes a serious problem when pharmacists do not correctly understand the instructions of the prescription.
Google wants to end this problem. In the context of a conference in India, the Google team mentioned that it is working on an intelligence model that would make it possible to decipher the handwriting of doctors.
We have started working on the complex process of identifying what is written on prescriptions by creating an assistance model to digitize it, using AI, for medical healthcare professionals.
The dynamic that it proposes is simple, since it will be integrated into Google Lens. It will be enough to open the mobile and take a photo of the doctor’s prescription. The app will scan the letter and detect the medicines that are mentioned in the prescription, as you see in the image above.
It will not only detect medications, but also highlight them on the prescription image, and do a quick Google search for relevant information. For example, description of the product, how it is used, side effects, composition, etc.
One detail that the Google team mentions is that this solution will only work as an “assistive technology” for pharmacists, but no decision would be made based only on the result of the AI. At the moment, it is only a prototype, and although the dynamics are more than attractive, it is not certain that Google will use this product in the future.
