Google can now read doctors’ bad handwriting

If it isn't the handwriting that is indecipherable, it is the abbreviations.

I worked for a very early stage startup that wanted to apply A.I. to clinical notes, I wanted to build a language model based on the abstracts of case reports because in some ways that is a model for clinical notes and we could get a lot of them.

We decided not to do that though because case reports aren't a good model for clinical notes in that the distribution of conditions involved is different and because case reports are written in much better English than clinical notes.

I know this is very niche at present. But, in future, technology like this could also be handy for anyone into genealogy. Trying to decipher the handwriting on old birth & death certificates can be next to impossible at times. I've always been puzzled as to why there wasn't a requirement to fill in such important forms in block capitals, rather than allowing the registrars to use their own and often 'doctor-esque' handwriting.