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

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 01:55:34AM -0700, 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
> 
> 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.

I agree

> Is the attached suitable as a data pack,

Yes, sure !

> even despite that
> the sql is self-sufficient and requires no data file (the
> data is within the individual sql statements)

In fact, that's the "preferred" way to do it. Even in the CA
INN case I would suggest providing a data pack doing so.

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

Please also briefly describe / link the TALLman letter
system from the appropriate page(s) in the wiki.

Thanks !

Karsten
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