handwriting conversion to text

[rwskitch]

... I'd like to pick some geeks brains and wonder if anyone has come across an app that will decipher my old handwritten VA notes and convert them to text, I've briefly

searched the google play store and they have so many, but not specifically what I want, so far... To be able to take a pic of the page w/all the hand written data and hav

-ing an app decipher it and convert it to text would be great and also save me a lot of $$$ using something like that instead of using something like what a court's deposi

-tion transcript conversion to text company does - recordings to text, but in this case, scanned handwriting to text... any/all ideas or leads would be greatly appreciated...

[Berta]

Many years ago I had to decifer handwritten SMR notations as well as VA handwritten notes, MRI assessments, lots of treatment records, blood chem reports, EKGs, etc for some local vets, so I know how miserable that task can be, and is very time consuming.

In one case, a vet had minimal inservice SMRs but they were all very difficult to read.

I blew many of them up on my PC, even tried to decifer some by trying to read them from a mirror ( sounds odd but that too can help)

and my daughter ( USAF Intel) told me to look for consistent specific patterns of handwriting in each entry. (how do they dot their I's, or shape any letters) All of these tricks  helped.

What helped the most was that the SMRS showed treatment for a condition that was really something else....for the exact disability he claimed and had been denied for many times. This vet had been denied for years and no lawyer or vet rep he had ever really tried to study his SMRs.

But once you get a little of the puzzle resolved, in deciphering records, then a lot more seems to be clearer.

My deceased husband had stacks of VA med recs and minimal SMRs ,all handwritten.In his case too I had quite a job deciphering lots of critical stuff.

By then I also had a good lay medical background on his conditions and had bought medical books at yard sales to give me knowledge of acronyms in the records. These days the internet has made all of that easier to do.

For my FTCA wrongful death case, even a crossed out notation was critical to that case.

When I was able to figure out what they had crossed out ( this was part of a cover up at one VA of malpractice at another VA)

and when I finally figured out this doctor's name,(hard to read too)  I contacted him, many years after he left VA for private practice and he, along with this entry and other records, provided me with a brief email statement that  my main IMO doctor (Dr Bash)called him and asked if he would put that statement on his Neuro letterhead, as it corroborated Dr. Bash's opinion, and the BVA gave his brief statement considerable weight and awarded.

The RO had ignored all of the IMOs I had.

One thing stands out to me...a three page MRI assessment on my husband...the handwriting was so bad I thought ,how could anyone ever figure out what it meant. Those 3 pages took me at least 3 weeks to decifer.

They were however critical to many of my claims.

You need to keep the med recs in the exact order,too , if you take any of them out of order to copy or blow up and also you will get used to who is making the same entries if many doctors entered handwritten notes into the records. That makes it easy, if you get familiar with  their individual writing patterns...

It would be great if there was an app for doing this but I sure have never seen any app that could.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vync]

21 hours ago, rwskitch said:

... I'd like to pick some geeks brains and wonder if anyone has come across an app that will decipher my old handwritten VA notes and convert them to text, I've briefly

searched the google play store and they have so many, but not specifically what I want, so far... To be able to take a pic of the page w/all the hand written data and hav

-ing an app decipher it and convert it to text would be great and also save me a lot of $$$ using something like that instead of using something like what a court's deposi

-tion transcript conversion to text company does - recordings to text, but in this case, scanned handwriting to text... any/all ideas or leads would be greatly appreciated...

Hey Buddy, 
Like you, the great majority of my treatment records prior to year 2000 are handwritten. I have an older HP OfficeJet 6500 scanner/printer which allows scanning documents into PDF and also can attempt to perform optical character recognition (OCR). In Adobe Reader, I can then select the sections I want and copy/paste them into a word processor.

This works ok for typed documents, but some handwritten documents can also be scanned in. In both cases, there are some characters which show up as gibberish and require some manual cleanup. Even if there is a speck of dust, it can throw it of. If cursive is used, all bets are off with what I have.

I did a google search and here's a link for some OCR which might handle cursive. I did not dig deeper, but this might be something worth exploring:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=optical%20character%20recognition%20for%20cursive%20handwriting

 

Also, why do doctors get paid so much some of them cannot even write as well as a first grader?