MediCrypt: Survey on Automated Recognition of Handwritten Medical Prescriptions for Enhanced Healthcare Efficiency

Illegible handwriting is a common issue with doctors’ prescriptions, and it can have dire consequences in terms of patient safety. Despite being skilled in expressing their thoughts and ideas, doctors often tend to have incomprehensible cursive handwriting. Given their busy schedules and the need to attend to numerous patients daily, it is understandable why their handwriting may be illegible. Consequently, prescriptions and reports may feature shorthand and cursive writing that the average person or pharmacist may not be able to read correctly, leading to the prescription of the wrong medications. Additionally, doctors who use regional languages for prescriptions make it more challenging to understand the content. In most parts of the world, people prefer to have a clear understanding of the medications prescribed by their doctors. Due to the illegible handwriting and medical abbreviations used by physicians, patients struggle to access the prescribed medication information. To alleviate this difficulty, a proposed solution is MediCrypt: an online recognition system that can predict doctors’ handwriting and generate digital prescriptions.