A crucial component of the digital transformation of paper files is the use of optical character recognition technology or OCR. By applying OCR, printed documents and other paper files are stored as digital text-searchable PDF files. OCR helps an organization to cut down lots of manual processes and that leads to better accuracy and efficiency.

Medical and health care professionals receive hundreds of scanned documents every day. These documents come from different sources like medical reports, test results from the laboratory, medical claims, and other patient correspondence. Unfortunately, there is no Ctrl+F or cmd+F functionality available to these documents. They are plain images or images embedded in a scanned PDF. Since these documents are unsearchable, if a medical staff wants to provide a piece of information, they must read through the scanned medical documents page by page and find this required information. Sometimes it can be tedious and frustrating. As an organization, you may have a very good document management system that has an excellent search functionality with document indexing and all, but your scanned documents are still not visible in the search results.

So, you have a problem here that is affecting the efficiency of your document data retrieval and how do you solve this? The solution to this is the technology called “Optical character recognition” or OCR.  An OCR software recognizes the text in a scanned image and converts it into a searchable PDF. So, in simple terms, OCR is the conversion of a photo of a text (Eg:- scanned file)  into machine-encoded text, (Searchable PDF). 

How is OCR software used in the medical and health care sector

By applying OCR, printed documents can be stored as searchable PDF files. If you have an existing patient data management software, these searchable PDFs can be linked to the EHR or electronic patient health record. So after this OCR conversion process, scanned documents can be easily accessed at any time using keywords. You can even create a medical archive of scanned patient data with a searchable index. Another improvement is the way you electronically exchange the document. When you send a searchable PDF as an email attachment, the text layer in that OCR PDF is searchable in the receiver’s mailbox. In the medical and healthcare sector, it is a good practice to apply OCR and convert all your scanned documents to searchable PDFs. OCR automation using OCR PDF software can significantly improve the performance of your team and patient data retrieval.

OCRvision is an OCR software with multilanguage support. OCRvision runs in the background and converts any scanned documents to searchable PDFs. Our OCR software can help you to auto-OCR and batch convert your scanned files to searchable digital files. Please watch the video below for more details.