Turning paper hospital records into a RAG assistant is a data project first
A hospital still keeps most patient records as physical paper files. The goal is to build a RAG assistant that lets doctors or hospital staff ask for a patient’s medical history summary, past diabetes diagnoses, or earlier medications. The hard part is starting with years of paper records instead of clean digital data.
A likely first phase would scan the files, run OCR, and organize the data before building the RAG system. The open questions are what would work in healthcare, what mistakes to avoid, what the biggest challenges are, and whether a small team can realistically handle the project.
Key points
- The hospital’s records are mostly still on paper, so digitization comes first.
- The planned assistant would answer staff questions about history, diagnoses, and past medications.
- A practical path likely starts with scanning, OCR, and before RAG.
- Healthcare adds high stakes around accuracy, privacy, , and .
- Cost control depends on retrieving only the relevant record sections instead of sending everything to the model.