FDA to regulate look-alike/sound-alike drugs
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
August 13, 2008
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), under a congressional mandate, is working on a pilot project to better sort out the way in which drug names are approved, reports The Times, a New Jersey newspaper. The FDA has taken this step to cut down on the number of medical errors directly relating from medications that look and sound alike. Currently the FDA rejects between 35% and 40% of medication names that are initially proposed. However, the current system is not catching the 1,500 medication names that have been implicated in look-alike/sound-alike errors, the article says.
A 2006 Institute of Medicine report attributed 25% of the 1.5 million medical errors that were related to drugs as having to do with similar-sounding or looking names. The new process in development by the FDA forces drug companies proposing new drug names to have done adequate research to prove that there is not already a drug on the market that could be confused with the proposed medication.
To read the article, click, here.
