- It is estimated that every year 7 thousand deaths of patients are generated because of the bad handwriting of doctors.
- Poor handwriting causes confusion in pharmacists and in the patients themselves.
- The new Google Lens update plans to incorporate Artificial Intelligence to “translate” any type of handwritten document.
Health professionals are known for many positive aspects but there is also a criticism that is frequently made. It’s about the doctors letter, which is not always the best and is even a reason for ridicule. This is a topic that has been around for decades and is also associated with fatal consequences.
Bugs that cause deaths
In 2015 the Healthworld portal published the article Doctor’s illegible handwriting creating confusion, causing death. From an investigation it was identified that every year 44 thousand deaths caused by preventable medical errors are recorded. While of that figure at least 7 thousand deaths were caused by the bad handwriting of doctors.
With this it is demonstrated that the bad penmanship can be deadly. The reason is because at the time of writing the prescriptions confusion occurs both among patients and pharmacists.
But now, as a possible alternative, Google is working on a solution and the answer is in the Artificial intelligence. The objective is to generate an “interpreter” of any type of letter to generate an automatic translation.
Handwritten prescription interpreter
According to the article Google can now read your doctor’s bad handwriting of Techcrunch, the technology company is working on the development of an improvement of Google Lens, the object recognition mobile application. The novelty is that now it will be focused on prescriptions.
Based on what was disclosed, this feature will eventually be implemented within Google Lens. What is planned is that users take photos of their handwritten prescriptions and upload them from the gallery. For its part, the app will have sufficient capacity to instantly process what it says and will indicate the names of the medicines mentioned.
Something important is that this function It will not be exclusive to “translate” medical prescriptions. It is expected to be used for all types of documents. Therefore, it will be useful for the real-time interpretation of any sheet.
And to all this, how was the bad handwriting of the doctors generated?
This is a rather serious question and although there is no certain explanation, there are several hypotheses. In the book “Gold and swords. Historical curiosities of Argentina when it was Spanish” From the writer Daniel Balmaceda is offered as one of the most accepted.
What he mentions is that the horrible calligraphy of the doctors goes back to the fifteenth century, when in Spain the Royal Tribunal of the Protomedicato. It was a group of experts that was in charge of monitoring the professions related to health. With the arrival of the Spanish in America, this technical body settled in the Spanish-dominated colonies and as a rule they demanded that the recipes be written in Latin, as it is considered the most cultured language.
Over the years the population increased and therefore the number of diseases also increased, which caused many patients to complain that they did not understand the doctors’ prescriptions because Latin was not a language that was taught to the majority of people. the population.
Due to this situation, at the beginning of the 19th century it was decreed that doctors stopped writing prescriptions in Latin and did so in Spanish. This news was not to the liking of the doctors, since they believed that using the language of the common people reduced the prestige of their work.
The Argentine writer mentions that several doctors obeyed the order but in a bad way. Therefore, they decided to use a hard-to-read cursive in retaliation for the order issued by the authorities.
Also read:
The bad handwriting of doctors causes up to 7 thousand deaths per year
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Prevent your patients from dying from the “doctor’s letter”