Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology which has been found useful in the insurance industry. What this technology attempts to do is to translate representations of handwritten or typewritten information into digital data with which the computer can more easily deal. This really means that the computer can read textual information directly into systems to save re-keying of information and other associated complications. In other words, you can feed your documents into a machine and have the computer update the database without having to type it in.