Abstract
There is an increased risk of medication error and harm to a patient whenever 2 or more drug product names appear alike in sound, look, or meaning. Any ambiguity of the proprietary name (“trade” or “brand” name) of a drug product can lead to errors in ordering, dispensing, or administering medication. A drug’s name is a critical identifier, and correct product identification is important to the responsible administration of medicine. This article describes a series of tools created for regulatory reviewers to enhance the review of proprietary names under current federal regulations, with the goal of encouraging further innovation toward the goal of medication safety. These tools include measures of orthographic, phonetic, and semantic similarities and are designed be used together with the existing computerized measures of similarity. It is the hope that highlighting the importance of medication error reporting for the safety review process will further encourage health care professionals to provide adequate and detailed reporting regarding medication errors, which will lead to improvements in the overall safety review process.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Food and Drug Administration. Guidance for industry: contents of a complete submission for the evaluation of proprietary names. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/drugs/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformation/guidances/ucm075068.pdf. Published February 2010. Accessed November 25, 2014.
Food and Drug Administration. Guidance for industry: best practices in developing proprietary names for drugs. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/drugs/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformation/guidances/ucm398997.pdf. Published May 2014. Accessed November 25, 2014.
Kuhl PK, Iverson P. Mapping the perceptual magnet effect for speech using signal detection theory and multidimensional scaling. J Acoust Soc Am. 1994;97 (1):553–562.
Drews E, Zwitserlood P. Morphological and orthographic similarity in visual word recognition. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 1995;21 (5):1098–1116.
English Language Roots Reference. Chart of English language roots; 2012. http://www.prefixsuffix.com. Accessed February 25, 2014.
The Montrose Group. MyWord.info; 2007. http://myword.info/. Accessed February 25, 2014.
American Medical Association. United States adopted names stems; 2012. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-science/united-states-adopted-names-council/naming-guidelines/approved-stems.page. Accessed February 25, 2014.
Bergen BK. The psychological reality of phonaesthemes. Language. 2004;80 (2):291–311.
Boussidan A, Sagi E, Ploux S. Phonaesthemic and etymological effects on the distribution of senses in statistical models of semantics. Paper presented at: Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference 2009 Workshop on Distributional Semantics beyond Concrete Concepts; May 2009; Valletta, Malta.
Kohler W. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright; 1929.
Ramachandran VS, Hubbard EM. Synaesthesia: a window into perception, thought, and language. J Conscious Stud. 2001;8 (12):3–34.
Maurer D, Pathman T, Mondloch CJ. The shape of boubas: sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Dev Sci. 2006;9 (3):316–322.
International Phonetic Association. IPA chart; 2005. http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html. Accessed August 29, 2014.
Lambert BL, Donderi D, Senders JW. Similarity of drug names: comparison of objective and subjective measures. Psychology & Marketing. 2002;19 (7–8):641–661.
Lambert BL, Lin SJ, Chang KY, Gandhi SK. Similarity as a risk factor in drug-name confusion errors: the look-alike (orthographic) and sound-alike (phonetic) model. Med Care. 1999;37 (12):1214–1225.
Lambert BL. Predicting look-alike and sound-alike medication errors. Am J Health Syst Pharm. 1997;54 (10):1161–1171.
Phillips DP, Christenfeld N, Glynn LM. Increase in U.S. medication-error deaths between 1983–1993. Lancet. 1998;351:643–644.
National Research Council. To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2000.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Stockbridge, M.D., Taylor, K. A Method of Addressing Proprietary Name Similarity for US Prescription Drugs. Ther Innov Regul Sci 49, 524–529 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1177/2168479015570331
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2168479015570331