Google has proposed a remedy for the doctor ’s note . The tech giant is work on an AI engineering putz to decipher hard - to - read handwritten aesculapian prescriptions , as announced at its yearly Google for India conference on Monday and described ina company blogpost .
The feature will be part of Google Lens’library of applications . Lens can alreadyassess , copy , and paste handwritingfrom substantial life into your phone or calculator and automaticallyoffer hold up contextand entropy based on that text through its Search capableness . And the in - development prescription decode tool will work similarly . user will be able-bodied to take or upload a photo of a Doctor of the Church ’s annotation and then the Lens app will serve the prototype , detect listed medications , and automatically extend information about those drugs .
It might seem like a small footmark for Google Lens , which * technically * should ’ve been able to read doctor ’s hand like any other texts this whole time . However doctor ’s handwriting truly is worse than most citizenry ’ afterhours and hours of daily wearon their hands , and medico often operate in a singular tachygraphy . Plus , the stakes are much higher for digitalise a prescription than they are for transpose a handwritten grocery list into a text note on your phone .
Medical schools don’t teach penmanship, but Google is aiming to concoct a cure for physician’s poor handwriting.Photo:David Pereiras(Shutterstock)
Handwritten prescriptions have cause innumerable headaches , and worse . They can pass tomedication errorswhen chemist inevitablymake mistakestrying to decrypt the cryptic scratch . And often , the prescriptions themselves are imperfect from the offset — lacking important patient entropy .
Hastily scribbled aesculapian orders have been a long - known ( and joked about ) problem , and this is n’t the first time that technology has sample to tackle the progeny . About 20 year ago , pharmacy mountain range in the U.S. begantrialing vitamin E - scripts(i.e . online prescribing systems ) to switch off out the physician ’ penitentiary and composition wholly . And in many event , electronic ethical drug have become the average .
All but 10 states have a current , pending , or future law on the books mandate that medical providers expend e - playscript , allot toan analysis from MD Toolbox . In some states , like New York , fail to comply with the requirementcan lead to fines or even jailtime . And the federal governmentalso mandatesthat doctor who routinely dictate controlled substance to patient on Medicare eschew handwritten scripts for digital ones in most cases .
Yet handwritten orders still persist in the U.S. , and are the rife shape of prescription elsewhere in the human beings . And there arenumerous barriersto aesculapian digitization in India , where Google is aviate the feature article .
Google framed the in - progress product as most useful for pharmacists , and indicated that pill roller expertise was also key in breeding and recrudesce the new tech . Ina video cartridge holder , a company exec walk an audience through the method acting that one pharmacist used to determine the primal points of a Dr. ’s musical note .
The engineering is n’t quite quick for Dr. deployment yet , though . “ While the initial results have been heartening , much study still remains to be done before this system is ready for the real world , ” said Manish Gupta , Google India ’s film director of research , in the presentation .
And the company say the prescription feature is n’t mean to replace human comprehension . “ This will dissemble as an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten aesculapian documents by augment the human race in the loop such as apothecary , however no decision will be made entirely free-base on the output leave by this technology , ” the ship’s company say in a statementto Tech Crunch .
Google did not immediately answer to Gizmodo ’s questions about the tool or timeline , and it ’s unclear if the company plans to flesh out its prescription read puppet beyond India to other body politic .
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