How Well Can OCR Read Doctor Handwriting in 2026?

Benchmarking four open-source OCR engines on 5,578 handwritten medical prescriptions Key Takeaways PP-OCRv5 (5M parameters) and GLM-OCR (0.9B parameters) both achieve 20%+ exact match on handwritten prescriptions, a 10x jump over Tesseract and EasyOCR GLM-OCR leads on character accuracy (CER 0.328), while PP-OCRv5 leads on word accuracy (WER 0.789) A 5M-parameter model trained on curated data rivals a 900M-parameter vision-language model Neither engine is clinically deployable yet: even the best gets only 1 in 3 words exactly right Last month I spent some time squinting at prescription scans, trying to figure out if a doctor wrote Amoxicillin or Amitriptyline. I got it wrong twice. That got me wondering: how would today's OCR engines handle this? The stakes are real. Medication errors injure approximately 1.3 million people annually in the United States alone and cost an estimated $42 billion globally (WHO, 2017). Illegible handwriting is a well-documented contributor: 35.7% of handwri