Drug Name Similarity Index for Sound-Alikeness

Drug name confusion is one of major medical errors. Some similar drug names can cause medical accidents. In order to solve this problem, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare developed the drug name database system to prevent from authorizing drugs whose names are similar to existing drug names. Previous studies have been proposed the drug name similarity index based on look-alikeness. Despite of these efforts, the studies do not take account of drug name confusion caused by sound-alike. In this paper, we proposed the phonetic similarity index based on the features used in articulatory phonetics.