Top Apps for Reading Doctor’s Prescriptions (Rx) using Camera

Doctors often find themselves unofficially acknowledging that they have the worst handwriting in the world, especially when writing out prescriptions by hand, which are often unreadable due to the rush to write. Sometimes, even pharmacists find it difficult to understand the content of these prescriptions and decipher the “doctor’s handwriting”, making it nearly impossible for ordinary people to recognize their contents. This global problem has been around for decades and many technology companies have tried to solve it without success – until now. With the advancement of artificial intelligence models and their improved ability to optically recognize letters (OCR), many apps have emerged that can help decode the symbols of handwritten prescriptions or medical reports, allowing patients or pharmacists to identify the names of the drugs mentioned on the prescription through a picture taken by the camera. Below are the highlights of the best of these apps.

For some, ChatGPT is the “new Google” where we turn whenever we want a direct and detailed answer to almost any query. However, the AI robot from OpenAI is the most famous AI model ever, and it has undergone many developments and improvements that make it more capable of doing more than just answering simple queries, including translating unreadable doctor’s handwriting. This means that ChatGPT is suitable for deciphering the symbols and codes of handwritten medical prescriptions, allowing pharmacists and ordinary individuals to easily recognize the contents of such prescriptions with minimal effort.

Credit goes to the GPT-4o model that set new records in speech recognition and translation using artificial intelligence, in addition to its advanced optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, enabling it to recognize handwriting and extract text from images effectively. Compared to previous models, GPT-4o boasts a higher accuracy rate of around 80-94% in recognizing a variety of text types, even from complex or distorted images.

If you find yourself frustrated with the doctor’s handwriting in a completely incomprehensible prescription, you can run the ChatGPT app on your phone without needing to log in. Simply click on the camera or image icon to capture or upload a picture of the doctor’s prescription, then ask the robot to read and analyze it. After sending the request, the ChatGPT app will process the prescription image and identify the names of the drugs listed as well as clarify any other notes written by the doctor, such as the medication schedule. According to our experience with several prescriptions, the results were amazing as the app was able to easily decipher the script of the prescriptions!

During its annual conference in India in 2022 Google revealed that it is working on developing an app to help pharmacists understand medical prescriptions and identify the names of drugs written in them, especially prescriptions written by some doctors in unclear handwriting due to their rush. Although this app has not been released yet, the company’s AI assistant can be used to accomplish the same task. The Gemini app – based on the Gemini Pro model or Gemini Flash – can decipher handwritten text and accurately identify the drugs written in the prescription, bringing relief to pharmacists and reducing the occurrence of serious professional errors that can result from misreading a prescription that could cost someone their life.

If you find yourself in this situation, simply launch the Gemini app on your phone, which has replaced Google Assistant as the default assistant on modern Android phones and is now part of the Google main app for iPhones. Then, click on the camera icon within the app to take a picture of the medical prescription, and the clearer the picture, the higher the accuracy of recognizing the prescription contents. You can also upload an existing image from your phone’s photo library. After that, send the image with the request, stating “read and analyze the attached doctor’s prescription”, and the recognized drugs will be highlighted. The amazing thing about the Gemini app is that it not only lists the names of the drugs but also informs you of their functions, the required dosage, and includes additional health tips.

The Google Lens app is a magical tool when we want to search for information about something we don’t know the exact name of, or when we are in a hurry and don’t want to waste time typing. “Google Lens” helps us in such situations to quickly access results similar to the item we captured with our phone’s camera. Given its importance, we discussed in a previous article 5 uses of Google Lens that you may not know, and one of them was “helping to read doctor’s prescriptions” where the tool – thanks to advanced types of machine learning algorithms – can extract handwritten text from images, aiding in decoding doctors’ prescriptions that are difficult for ordinary people and even some pharmacists to interpret and read.

To use the Google Lens app, simply open the Google app on your Android phone as it is often preinstalled on phones, and it is also available for iPads and iPhones. After opening it, click on the colorful bordered camera icon in the search bar (on one side of the bar) to instantly open the “Google Lens” tool, then point your phone’s camera towards the medical prescription and press the camera button to capture a picture of it. After a few moments, you will notice that the tool has recognized most of the handwritten text within the prescription, so you only need to select any text or drug name to display it in a clearer, readable, copyable, and saveable form on the screen.

Few may know this artificial intelligence robot, despite its immense capabilities that make it a direct competitor to ChatGPT. In general, Claude is an app offered by the company Anthropic that develops AI models under the same name “Claude” and it closely resembles other AI chat apps based on AI models, helping with anything from writing to mathematics. The major difference compared to other apps is that Claude is an independent AI model, not relying on ChatGPT or any other model. Currently, Claude 3.5 Sonnet by “Anthropic” is the most powerful model developed by them, capable of creating complex graphs in addition to its tremendous abilities, which also include precise optical character recognition of handwritten text in any language.

In the usual way, you can run the Claude by Anthropic app after downloading it from the Play Store on your Android phone or App Store on the iPhone, then log in. You can then upload a picture of the medical prescription from your phone by clicking on the Upload image icon (as indicated in the above image) or take a picture with the camera and ask the bot to analyze the image and recognize the drug names, after which the app will show you the drug names and any notes or texts mentioned in the prescription or medical report.