Drug name confusion errors in the published literature and the USP Medication Errors Reporting Program, 1965-2004: a reconstructed dataset of 724 confused drug name pairs

A reconstructed dataset of 724 confused drug name pairs from 1965–2004 shows only 69 overlapping pairs between published literature and USP MER reports.

• Why it matters: Medication errors from look-alike/sound-alike drug names have long been reported, but the underlying case reports were not available as a public, machine-readable resource.
• What they did: The team exported and reconciled five unreleased Access databases (2002–2005 collection), mapped names to RxNorm and ATC classes, computed five orthographic similarity measures, and added limited PubMed pairs from June 2005–February 2026.
• The result: Similarity measures separated reported pairs from random re-pairings (AUC 0.88–0.92), while 30% of pairs had BI-SIM below 0.40 and literature cases were more severe (fatal: 15.2% vs 1.2%).

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