Why dont we start with generic prescribing?
That would reduce the namespace by about 80%, as well as cut the
confusion with all the synonyms
Is there any documented evidence that people have died as a result of
confusing brand names?
R
Ken Harvey wrote:
Computer Scientist Sorts Out Confusable Drug Names
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060302180023.htm
Was that Xanex or Xanax? Or maybe Zantac? If you're a health care
professional you'd better know the difference--mistakes can be fatal.
An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone are injured
each year from medication errors, and the U.S. Federal Drug
Administration (FDA) has been working to reduce the possibilities of
these errors, such as a documented case in which a patient needed an
injection of Narcan but received Norcuron and went into cardiac arrest.
A few years ago, the FDA turned to Project Performance Corporation
(PPC), a U.S. software company, to ensure they don't approve the names
of new drugs that may easily be confused with any one of the more than
4,400 drugs that have already been approved.
PPC looked at the problem and then, based on a tip from a professor at
the University of Maryland, turned to Dr. Greg Kondrak, a professor in
the University of Alberta Department of Computing Science.
"During my PhD research, I wrote a program called ALINE for
identifying similar-sounding words in the world's languages. The
program incorporates techniques developed in linguistics and
bioinformatics," Kondrak said. "At the time some people criticized it
because they felt it wouldn't ever have a practical application."
PPC analyzed Kondrak's program and felt it might help with their
project. Kondrak gave them ALINE and then created a new program for
them, BI SIM, which analyzes and compares the spelling of words.
PPC combined Kondrak's programs into a system that the FDA has been
using for the past two years to analyze proposed drug names and rank
them in terms of confusability, both phonetically and
orthographically, with existing drugs.
"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," 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," he added. Drug companies covet finding good,
short drug names that are easy to remember, Kondrak noted, adding,
"the FDA and other drug agencies need to balance this against
confusing the names with existing ones--it's a serious problem."
Kondrak co-authored a paper on this topic that was recently published
in the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Earlier, he gave a
presentation to Health Canada officials, who are interested in
following the FDA's lead in addressing the problem of confusing drug
names.
A number of linguists and computer scientists are also now using
Kondrak's ALINE for various purposes, and he is pleased his software,
once criticized as being useless, is much in demand, though he does
not charge anyone to use it.
"If anyone asks for it, I just give it to them," Kondrak said. "I was
a funded researcher, and I look at it as my responsibility to share
what I've learned and what I've done."
"When you do basic research sometimes you don't know how it might
become of use, but if this software helps to reduce even just 10 per
cent of prescription errors in the U.S. that translates into helping a
lot of people, and it's very satisfying to contribute to that."
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