In spite of FDA's best efforts, medication errors continue
to burden our health care system. These errors can occur for a
variety of reasons, ranging from pharmacists incorrectly
interpreting the letters or words on a hand-written prescription,
to nurses incorrectly interpreting physician instructions for
hospitalized patients, and are estimated to cause approximately
7,000 deaths each year in the United States alone.
The United States Food and Drug Administration ("FDA")
recently unveiled a new initiative to reduce medication errors by
evaluating product names using a Phonetic and Orthographic Computer
Analysis ("POCA"). In a May 2014 Draft Guidance,
entitled Best Practices in Developing Proprietary Names for
Drugs, FDA notes that its intentions are "to develop
proprietary names that do not cause or contribute to medication
errors or otherwise contribute to the misbranding of the
drug."
