and allow it to be used for a better patient experience.” “What we attempt to do, using Clarity, is structure that unstructured document and bring it into the in a way that’s meaningful. “When a fax is rendered at the receiver’s end it is difficult for that information to be put into a database,” explained John Nebergall, Chief Operating Officer at Consensus Cloud Solutions, in an in-person interview with Healthcare IT Today. OCR + NLP is a powerful combination when applied to electronic documents, including faxes which are still used frequently in healthcare.Ĭonsensus Cloud Solutions’ Clarity offering combines OCR and NLP in a powerful tool that unlocks the unstructured data that is held within faxes. When applied successfully, it can extract information and insights from those documents. Natural Language Processing (NLP), allows computers to “understand” the contents of documents by analyzing the words and language used. How would you translate a “double-play” for example if you didn’t know what that actually was?

Although they might be able to convert the words being said, their lack of context would result in a translation that might not be completely understandable. Here is an analogy: Think of OCR as an Italian translator who is completely unfamiliar with baseball who is asked to translate a baseball broadcast. OCR is typically applied to scanned paper documents, photos, and other electronic images.Ī limitation of OCR, however, is that it’s not capable of providing context for the documents it processes. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the technology that turns handwritten or typed text into machine-encoded text that a computer understands. Their added capability means that clinicians will now have additional context when providing care to patients, which can lead to better outcomes and reduced costs. Consensus Cloud Solutions has added Natural Language Processing capability to its offerings which will make it much easier for healthcare organizations to turn unstructured documents into a rich source of information.

Fax to ocr scanner