A Way to End Drug-Name Confusion

An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone suffer each year from medication prescription errors, leading to injury and sometimes even death. To overcome such mistakes, Project Performance Corporation (PPC, McLean, VA, USA), on behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has developed a software system that the FDA is using to analyze proposed drug names and rank them in terms of confusability, both phonetically and orthographically, with existing drugs.

The system is based on two software programs created by Dr. Greg Kondrak, a professor of computer science at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). Aline, a program that incorporates techniques developed in linguistics and bioinformatics for identifying similar-sounding words in different languages, was combined with Bi Sim, a program that analyzes and compares the spelling of words. Kondrak co-authored a paper on this topic that was published in the January 2006 edition of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

The FDA used to have dozens of people scouring the lists of names to check if the proposed ones were too similar to any of them, and this wasn't a good use of resources, and it wasn't always effective; people make mistakes, Dr. Kondrak said. But now one person using PPC's system can identify sound-alike and look-alike drug names with great accuracy in a matter of seconds.”

Drug companies covet finding good, short drug names that are easy to remember, but can inadvertently choose names that could be confused with any one of the more than 4,400 drugs that have already been approved.


Related Links:
Project Performance Corporation
University of Alberta