What is optical character recognition (OCR) and how is it used in healthcare IT?

What will be an ideal response?

Some unstructured data occurs in the form of text printed on paper. Converting this to an electronic format requires creating (photographing) an image of the text. However, an electronic image of a document that contains text is just that-an image. As such, the document cannot be edited or searched. One method by which this problem can be avoided is called optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is the process in which scanned images of handwritten or printed text are translated into computer readable text. This converts the image file into a data file containing the text, which can then be edited, searched, or printed, as with any normal computer-generated, word processor text.