Perception and Memory Experiments Using Drug Names [2010, Canada]

Drug names that look and sound alike are a leading cause of medication errors (e.g., diazepam and diltiazem, hydroxyzine and hydralazine, Paxil and Taxol, fomepizole and omeprazole, Foradil and Toradol). Observational studies of dispensing in outpatient pharmacies suggest that the rate of wrong drug errors -- the type most likely to be the result of name confusion -- is roughly 0.13 percent. With 3.9 billion prescriptions dispensed in 2009, that translates to 5 million wrong drug errors per year in the United States. The purpose of this overall project was to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate a standard protocol for pre-approval testing of drug names, including a standard battery of psycholinguistic tests and data analytic methods, all with comparison to control names and to refine and demonstrate analytic methods by conducting a series of visual perception, auditory perception, and short term memory experiments using drug names as stimuli. The achievement of this aim will provide both regulators and pharmaceutical manufacturers with a scientifically validated, step-by-step method for testing new drug names for confusability. The data for this collection come from four experiments. In each experiment, participants are tested on their ability to correctly identify drug names under four conditions (see study design). Variables include participant reaction time to identify drug names and the percent participants correctly or incorrectly identified drug names. Study participants include medical doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and pharmacy technicians. Other variables include participant gender, education degree held, primary language spoken, and employment location.