Identification of Confusable Drug Names:
A New Approach and Evaluation Methodology
This paper addresses the mitigation of medical errors due to
the confusion of sound-alike and look-alike drug names.
Our approach involves application of two new methods---one
based on orthographic similarity (``look-alike'')
and the other based on phonetic similarity (``sound-alike'').
We present a new recall-based evaluation methodology for determining
the effectiveness of different similarity measures on drug names.
We show that the new orthographic measure (BI-SIM)
outperforms other commonly used measures of similarity
on a set containing both look-alike and sound-alike pairs,
and that the feature-based phonetic approach (ALINE)
outperforms orthographic approaches on a test set
containing solely sound-alike confusion pairs.
However,
an approach that combines several different measures achieves the
best results on both test sets.