Perfect Prescription for Pharmacies
Text recognition made by KADMOS: KADMOS best OCR Software
allows the healthcare sector to reduce costs by delivering automation and a high recognition rate.
NOVENTI Group, a leading IT service provider in the DACH region, performs document
recognition using KADMOS best OCR software. At the local pharmacy, NOVENTI’s subsidiary and software provider awinta recently adopted the powerful KADMOS OCR Engine. This allows pharmacies to largely automate in-store prescription processing.
Thanks to this sophisticated OCR/ICR technology, which is part of an end-to-end solution installed in NOVENTI Group’s data centers, over 95 percent of the prescription content is captured. This helps to cut the monthly workload by hundreds of hours since the
millions of submitted prescriptions can be processed much more accurately and completely. As a result, the number of errors that require manual attention is greatly reduced.
KADMOS GmbH, www.best-ocr.com
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NOVENTI Group (VSA Group until February 2016) primarily comprises three large subsidiaries. Serving around 7,000 customers, awinta is the leading provider of software for pharmacies
on the German healthcare market. Approximately one third of all German pharmacies employ
commodity management systems from awinta. AZH offers services relating to billing prescriptions for remedies and medical aids issued by healthcare professionals. Companies hailing
from 20 different industries as diverse as orthopedical shoemakers and speech therapists submit their billing cases to AZH. These include the prescription and various approval documents
(a heterogeneous assortment of paper-based documents) that AZH processes before settling
charges with the health insurance companies.
VSA is one of five dedicated pharmacy data centers in Germany. It collects prescriptions and
performs settlement tasks for 6,500 pharmacies, which corresponds to a market share of 33
percent. VSA processes standard-pattern-16 prescriptions in a manner such that the pharmacist receives the amount due after billing has been settled with the insurer.
15 Million Prescriptions Captured and Processed per Month
Both companies deal with very large volumes: VSA settles 15 million prescriptions each month,
and AZH processes 1.6 million billing cases. The paper documents received in formats ranging
from A6 to A4 are digitized on high-performance scanning lines in Munich (VSA) and Fichtach
(AZH) before being subjected to text recognition. Any information missed during this process
is corrected by human staff to ensure that the prescription is recognized in its entirety. This is
essential since health insurance providers only reimburse complete prescriptions.
The objective is clear: Minimize the number of rejections by submitting correct prescriptions.
Modern software such as the KADMOS OCR Engine greatly facilitates this task, which is why
VSA has been relying on this application for 15 years. It forms part of an end-to-end production
system that comprises further software components for visualizing and entering individual parameters and fields from the prescription in addition to mapping the entire business logic.
Greatly Reduced Correction Effort in the Pharmacy
Automatic bulk processing in the data center is one side of the picture; pharmacies, too, receive
dozens of prescriptions each day and must process them before they are submitted to a billing
center and the insurer. awinta turned to KADMOS in late 2015 to assist its customers with this
task. The new solution replaced the previous Russian OCR software. The NOVENTI management was looking for a solution able to improve recognition rates at the pharmacists’ terminals
by ten percent. “We achieved this goal with KADMOS,” says Dr. Friedrich Kopitsch, organizational counselor at NOVENTI Group: “The legacy solution offered a recognition rate of 85 percent, but today we can deliver 95 percent. This reduces the gap to perfect recognition from 15
to five percent, thus effectively tripling our performance with KADMOS!”
Multi-Recognition Delivers Top Results
What makes the task even more challenging is the fact that prescriptions are printed using a
broad variety of font sizes and at differing levels of quality, depending on whether the toner at
the pharmacy has just been replaced or is all but depleted. The previous OCR software was
unable to recognize any bold or very weak characters. Now that the KADMOS system is installed, awinta is performing multiple capture runs at different exposures – a process called
binarization. The best result is selected from the various scans.
KADMOS GmbH, www.best-ocr.com
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This is made possible thanks to the per-workstation licensing scheme of KADMOS. The previous licensing model, which was based on the number of detected characters, would have
made this multiple recognition approach unaffordable.
Pharmacists process prescriptions as follows: They first scan the prescription received from
the customer, and then KADMOS gathers information on the insured person, the doctor and
the medical content. Dr. Friedrich Kopitsch elaborates: “The software perfectly recognizes the
different notations for prescriptions, which result from the approximately 100 common medical
packages that exist in Germany; this means we are presently able to offer pharmacists 95
percent of the prescription content. This greatly reduces the manual data entry workload since
most of the commodity management system’s fields have already been populated automatically.”
All that remains to be done at the pharmacy is to check whether all entries were captured
correctly, approve the prescription and print it. The pharmaceutical registration number is
added to the right margin of the prescription to indicate what number of which substance was
dispensed at what price. The final document is scanned again to fully document the process
before a paper version of the prescription is sent to VSA or another clearing center.
Pharmacies can currently enhance their existing scan solution by adding KADMOS OCR.
Close to 30,000 terminals installed at the 7,000 pharmacies partnering with awinta are potentially compatible. Moreover, awinta developed a new pharmacy portal in cooperation with
Wincor. The AC 1 combines all previously separate components – PC, printer and scanner –
in a compact unit that naturally also includes the KADMOS Engine. According to awinta’s estimates, the market potential for the AC 1 amounts to thousands of devices. In light of this new
product, a great many German pharmacists will make acquaintance with the market’s most
powerful OCR engine.
KADMOS GmbH, www.best-ocr.com
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