Towards Intelligent Virtual Clerks: AI-Driven Automation for Clinical Data Entry in Dialysis Care

Manual data entry in dialysis centers is time-consuming, error-prone, and increases the administrative burden on healthcare professionals. Traditional optical character recognition (OCR) systems partially automate this process but lack the ability to handle complex data anomalies and ensure reliable clinical documentation. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-enhanced OCR system that integrates advanced image processing, rule-based validation, and large language model-driven anomaly detection to improve data accuracy, workflow efficiency, and user experience. A total of 65 laboratory reports, each containing approximately 35 fields, were processed and compared under two configurations: a basic OCR system and the AI-enhanced OCR system. System performance was evaluated using three key metrics: error detection accuracy across three error categories (Missing Values, Out-of-Range, and Typo/Free-text), workflow efficiency measured by average processing time per record and total completion time, and user acceptance measured using the System Usability Scale (SUS). The AI-enhanced OCR system outperformed the basic OCR system in all metrics, particularly in detecting and correcting Out-of-Range errors, such as decimal placement issues, achieving near-perfect precision and recall. It reduced the average processing time per record by almost 50% (85.2 to 42.1 s) and improved usability, scoring 81.0 (Excellent) compared to 75.0 (Good). These results demonstrate the potential of AI-driven OCR to reduce clerical workload, improve healthcare data quality, and streamline clinical workflows, while maintaining a human-in-the-loop verification process to ensure patient safety and data integrity.