
FDA Phonetic and Orthographic Computer Analysis Program - jcr
http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Industry/ucm400127.htm
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treerex
Here are two papers that describe the techniques used by the FDA system (or
that were used in the mid-2000's) to find these confusable names.

"Automatic identification of confusable drug names" (2006,
[http://goo.gl/W5DK0f](http://goo.gl/W5DK0f) PDF)

and

"Identification of Confusable Drug Names: A New Approach and Evaluation
Methodology" (2004, [http://goo.gl/RziUgf](http://goo.gl/RziUgf) PDF)

Both by Grzegorz Kondrak and Bonnie Dorr.

I've used the BI-SIM in a medical-informatics system and it does quite well.
I'm also a big fan of EDITEX, which for some uses is better.

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jcr
This submission was reposted by request. The POCA software was mentioned in
the "How FDA Reviews Proposed Drug Names" PDF and is somewhat interesting
reading:

[http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/MedicationErro...](http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/MedicationErrors/ucm080867.pdf)

The PDF was previously submitted by 'aclimatt' here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079659)

