Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is extremely useful in various sectors for exploring massive archived data. This technology enables the digitization of printed and handwritten texts that are frequently present in the medical field. For instance, medication error (ME) reports were previously and still in some healthcare facilities written manually, this has led to the accumulation of numerous handwritten data that are unfortunately challenging to exploit. Their digitization through OCR allows extracting important data from these documents and using them to populate the database to implement future analysis techniques to optimize the medication error management process. This paper presents a transformer-based handwritten recognition architecture that employs the Transformer-Based Optical Character Recognition (TrOCR) model combined with image segmentation techniques. Although the TrOCR model provided by Microsoft performs reasonably well in handwritten recognition, it is limited to English text because its pretrained version was trained exclusively on English samples. This limitation is problematic for us, as our task involves digitizing French medication dictation errors. Additionally, its limitation to processing single-line text images impairs its ability to recognize paragraphs. To address these limitations, we will fine-tune the model on French handwritten data and integrate a single-line level segmentation technique, thereby overcoming these constraints. Therefore, the preliminary results from implementing our proposed architecture are promising for the digitization of medication error reports.

Because of their potentially serious consequences, Medication errors (ME) represent a major challenge for health-care facilities. To manage these errors and minimize their seriousness, healthcare professionals follow a collaborative management process that relies on reporting and then analyzing the reports filled in by them via various reporting tools, both digital and paper-based. These tools can be customized requiring specific information to be entered in multiple forms with commonly the presence of textual descriptions to fill in a free-text field. Therefore, text analysis is crucial for thoroughly understanding and effectively analyzing medication errors. Given the large volume of reports to be quickly processed, it is essential to help healthcare professionals prioritize which ME to analyze. In this context, we propose, in this work, processing ME reports with natural language processing tasks using Transformer models such as GPT. In this study, we present the extraction of key information from the reports to help structure textual descriptions of ME with the GPT-4 transformer model. The results obtained show the potential of this model to extract relevant information from ME descriptions in French language without any deep fine-tuning,

Medication errors associated with the Medication Use Process present significant risks and require effective management. However, current practices do not address these risks. There is a lack of awareness that medication errors are unintended risks, and a lack of dedicated systems to manage them. To overcome these limitations, a digital system exploiting massive medical data (big data) is proposed. By integrating various data sources, this system aims to provide adaptable medication errors’ management and continuous improvement. This article presents an overview of the system requirements and highlights the potential of Data Mining in healthcare. Implementing this system could revolutionize medication error management and improve patient safety.