OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that converts an image of text into machine-readable characters. In pharmacy automation, OCR is used to extract text from fax images — reading a prescription’s drug name, patient information, and dosage instructions as plain text.

OCR is the starting point for fax prescription automation, but it is not the full solution. OCR produces a text string; it does not interpret that string against clinical context. A prescription for “Lipitor 20mg” becomes the text “Lipitor 20mg” — OCR cannot tell you which DIN to select in Kroll, whether you carry a generic alternative, or how to map the sig line to Kroll’s format.

OCR-only pharmacy tools require manual DIN selection after the text has been extracted. Staff review the OCR output and look up the correct DIN themselves — reducing the physical typing but not the decision-making burden.

Multi-agent AI builds on OCR by adding a comprehension layer: reading the extracted text against your Kroll drug catalog, patient history, and other context before generating a write. This is how AutoRx achieves a DIN match rate above 95% on first attempt — not from better OCR alone, but from using the extracted text as input to a broader reasoning process.