Are national efforts to reduce drug name confusion paying off?
ISMP Medication Safety Alert! Acute Care Edition. November 29, 2018;23:1-6.
Look-alike and sound-alike medications present a recurring threat to patient safety. This newsletter article summarizes an analysis of reported drug name confusion errors. Although incidents seem to have decreased over time, the influx of generic drug names is contributing to the persistence of the problem. Increased federal attention to the issue, provider use of known strategies to improve practice, and pharmaceutical company testing of names to avoid similarities can help reduce drug name confusion.