Drug name confusion case reports, 1965–2004: an archived dataset of 724 confused drug name pairs from the published literature and the USP Medication Errors Reporting Program

Medication errors caused by confusion between similar drug names (look-alike/sound-alike, or LASA, errors) have been reported in the biomedical literature for decades, but the underlying case reports have never been assembled into a public, machine-readable dataset. Between 2002 and 2005 Sengwee Toh compiled such a collection for a Master's thesis at the University of Illinois at Chicago: case reports extracted from the published literature (1965–2004) and a research extract of reports from the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) Medication Errors Reporting (MER) Program (1997–2003). The data sat in five Microsoft Access databases and were never released. This deposit is the archived version of that collection. In 2026 the five databases were exported and reconciled into two case-level files (709 literature case records and 753 USP reports) and a pair-level file of 724 confused drug name pairs, enriched with RxNorm identifiers, WHO ATC codes, five orthographic similarity scores, and membership on the FDA and ISMP lists of drug names with recommended Tall Man letters. A limited PubMed search for June 2005–February 2026 contributed 16 additional pairs. The USP file is released in redacted form, without practitioner narratives or accession numbers. The deposit also contains a codebook, the original thesis, the processing scripts, an audit report, and a SHA-256 checksum manifest. A companion paper describing the dataset has been submitted to medRxiv; the link will be added here when it is posted. The dataset is a historical record of what was reported up to 2005, not a current or complete list of confused drug names. Licensing: data and documentation CC BY 4.0; code MIT; the thesis is redistributed with its author's permission. See LICENSE.md. Original data collection was supported by AHRQ grant R01 HS011609.