Case Study: University Children’s Hospital Zurich preserves unique research data with Acodis intelligent document processing

University Childrens Hospital Opening up a Worldwide Unique Data Set With Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

University Children’s Hospital Zurich partnered with Acodis to tackle the digitization of its Zurich Longitudinal Studies archive, a worldwide unique dataset built from more than 750,000 paper sheets collected since the 1950s. The challenge was to make hand-filled questionnaires and examination protocols accessible for future research, and the pilot project focused on digitizing and extracting data from 5,000 questionnaires using Acodis’s ICR and data extraction capabilities.

Acodis created a training set from pre-digitized questionnaires and built a specialized ICR system to recognize handwritten numbers, automatically detect questionnaire structures, and organize the extracted data for post-processing in a custom editor. The pilot was successfully completed, enabling faster manual review and correction, preserving valuable research data, and paving the way for the full dataset to be read out over time.

University Children’s Hospital Zurich

Oskar Jenni

Head