Automated reading and mining of pre-hospital care reports

The lack of use of high technology in the healthcare delivery system is especially apparent in the emergency medical information systems (EMIS) area. For example, in New York State, all patients who enter the emergency medical service (EMS) are tracked through their pre-hospital care to the emergency room using a pre-hospital care report (PCR). Our goal is to automate the collection of data from the PCR and enable efficient maintenance and dissemination of information. The task involves the automatic extraction and transliteration of the handwritten text in the response boxes provided on the form. The objective is to produce, for each form image, an ASCII transcription of the handwritten contents of the response boxes. These responses could be then used to populate a database. The database itself would then emerge as a valuable resource for enabling data mining and knowledge discovery for the entire medical community.