Re: [Gnumed-devel] Medication errors related to drug names, and the approach of TALLman lettering

[Jim Busser]

On 2011-09-04, at 11:07 PM, Jim Busser wrote:

> More recently, the risks of drug name confusion brought forward a practice 
> called TALLman lettering which, in addition to endorsing the distinction 
> based on first character, proposed upper case within drug names to emphasize 
> distinctions:
> 
>       http://www.ismp.org/Tools/tallmanletters.pdf

The attached will now find and replace the first occurrence of any of these 
frequently-confused drugs in each of the descriptions in

        ref.branded_drug
        ref.consumable_substance

The reason for this is because the list contains a mixtures of brand and 
non-proprietary (substance) names and it is possible that some generic 
companies have used the substance name in their brand names like apo- etc. 
(Also, frankly, it was less work to tease them out :-) ... it will also add 
safety even when a clinician who had manually inputted a substance or brand 
name in the wrong table. <grin> 

I expect that even in non-English speaking countries, some of the drug names 
may be the same and so in the case of an exact match on spelling it makes sense 
to make the letters distinct (the characters in the name are unchanged except 
for some changing of upper <--> lower case.

Is the attached suitable as a data pack, even despite that the sql is 
self-sufficient and requires no data file (the data is within the individual 
sql statements)

??

If yes, suggest

-- … configurational name = 'Drug safety re-lettering (TALLman)'
-- … rename as 'install-data-pack.sql' within GNUmed data pack

-- Jim

TALLman.sql
Description: Binary data