Automated Digitization of Unstructured Medical Prescriptions

Abstract

Automated digitization of prescription images is a critical prerequisite to scale digital healthcare services such as online pharmacies. This is challenging in emerging markets since prescriptions are not digitized at source and patients lack the medical expertise to interpret prescriptions to place orders. In this paper, we present prescription digitization system for online medicine ordering built with minimal supervision. Our system uses a modular pipeline comprising a mix of ML and rule-based components for (a) image to text extraction, (b) segmentation into blocks and medication items, (c) medication attribute extraction, (d) matching against medicine catalog, and (e) shopping cart building. Our approach efficiently utilizes multiple signals like layout, medical ontologies, and semantic embeddings via LayoutLMv2 model to yield substantial improvement relative to strong baselines on medication attribute extraction. Our pipeline achieves +5.9% gain in precision@3 and +5.6% in recall@3 over catalog-based fuzzy matching baseline for shopping cart building for printed prescriptions.