Project Belize is a 501(c)(3) that runs medical clinics in Belize, often in remote villages. Over four days of clinics, the team sees enough patients to fill around 700 handwritten intake forms - three names to a page - recorded on the spot in difficult field conditions. By the time those forms reach data entry, they show it: handwritten in jungle villages, many are barely legible, sweat-stained, folded, and torn.
For years, turning that paper into usable data meant brute force. Five or six volunteers would sit with laptops in the hotel restaurant in the evenings, after full days running clinics, and keypunch names into a spreadsheet for three to four hours a night. It was work they hated, and it often wasn’t finished until after the trip had ended. By the third year, Dr. Roger McNellie had nearly given up on doing it in-house - to the point of planning to ship the pages home and find a church group to take it on. That was when he found Handwriting OCR.
Now the intake forms go straight from scan into an Excel document - the same structured data that becomes Project Belize’s final report to Belize’s minister of health. What surprised him most was the accuracy: despite the state of the paper, he put it at well over 95%, and estimated the tool saved at least 80% of the labor the project used to pour into data entry. It’s now part of how Project Belize operates from one year to the next.
Frequently asked questions
Can Handwriting OCR read damaged or low-quality handwritten forms?
Degraded documents are a core use case. In this project the intake forms were barely legible, sweat-stained, folded, and torn, and the customer reported accuracy well over 95%. Results always depend on the condition of the original, but poor-quality field documents are exactly what the service is built to handle.
Can it output data to a spreadsheet?
Yes. Form data can be extracted to Excel (XLSX) or JSON, which is how this customer turns intake forms into the structured report they submit.