Three Industries Taking Advantage of Optical Character Recognition

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Meta Description: The optical character recognition technology is used to transform textual, handwritten, or image form data into electronic form.

In today’s fast-paced world, the online business must strive to meet the evolving need of customers to have a competitive edge. In the highly digitized world where there is a huge increase in the data of the user, having the technology to manage the data is highly recommended. Long gone are the days when the customer was required to take part in a tedious process for their data management. With Optical Character Recognition or OCR, customers can now easily onboard a business in no time. The advanced OCR technology has streamlined the process of data entry for businesses and helped them in saving money required by the manual data entry process. In this blog, we will highlight the importance of optical character recognition and which industries have benefited from it.

What is OCR Technology

The OCR technology is used to transform textual, handwritten, or image form data into electronic form. The technology uses artificial intelligence and pre-processing, data extraction, and post-processing techniques to extract data into the digital form. The optical character recognition is trained to extract data in any language and even analyse the coloured image. The extracted information is then stored in the online database to be used for future references.

Industries benefiting from Optical Character Recognition System

Banking Industry

The banking industry and financial institutions are known to handle a huge amount of paperwork in their day to day tasks which is why they often use optical character recognition technology. Business Process Automation systems are a key part of the customer data processing and optical character recognition can play an important role in it. It assists in the easy while accurate data extraction of the documents in order to streamline the banking process.

ATM machines are another use case of optical character recognition that the banking industry uses. The number on the credit card or debit card is instantly extracted and processed digitally for payment purposes. Another use case of the OCR technology is the information given on the handwritten cheques which are analysed and managed easily without any frustrating process of manual data entry. The important information like name, address, signatures of the end-user are extracted and processed in real-time.

Artificial intelligence has brought this new technology to the table and intelligent character recognition is increasingly being adopted by the banking industry to manage paperwork and payment information.

Healthcare Industry

The medical sector has always had to face a huge amount of data of the patient and in turn, a huge amount of paperwork to keep the patient data. The large volume of the data can be hard to manage and keeping its track can be a hassle for the hospitals. Optical character recognition provides the most perfect solution for the medical industry to cater to their data entry process. It assists in converting data from its image or text form to online. The data includes patient profile, treatment history, insurance payments etc. Once the information is stored in digital form, it can be acquired at any time easily. The medical industry benefits from it as it allows an easy view of the medical history of the patient.

Other than this, the information extracted through optical character recognition is stored in cloud storage where it remains safe and secure. The medical service providers can streamline the patient data and access it easily. Additionally, the pharmaceutical industry can use OCR to manage all the data regarding the drugs and digitally store it in the online database. It is then extracted whenever required. This helps the pharmacies optimise their time management.

Finance Industry

Another sector that can hugely benefit from the OCR solutions is the finance sector. This provides experts in the industry and accountants with a major opportunity to focus on higher priority tasks than using the conventional method to process the information. Optical character recognition technology can be used by the finance industry to automate its operations and reduce the turnaround time. OCR can not only streamline the process but also ensure productivity for financial organizations.

A report suggests that businesses are investing more than a billion dollars in fraud prevention. Fraudsters use methods like blank and double receipts, transactions from non-banking organizations, and faking values by adding more values to real expenses. Optical character recognition assists in eliminating these types of frauds through the OCR management system in the smart devices that are used to perform these financial activities.