Tall Man lettering

Tall man lettering (tall-man lettering or tallman lettering) is the practice of writing part of a drug's name in upper case letters to help distinguish sound-alike, look-alike drugs from one another in order to avoid medication errors. For example, in tall man lettering, "prednisone" and "prednisolone" should be written "predniSONE" and "predniSOLONE", respectively. The Office of Generic Drugs of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) encourages manufacturers to use tall man lettering labels to visually differentiate their drugs' names, and a number of hospitals, clinics, and health care systems use tall man lettering in their computerized order entry, automated dispensing machines, medication admission records, prescription labels, and drug product labels.

Examples

The FDA and Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) published a list of recommended Tall-Man Letters for look-alike drugs which includes, but is not limited to:

• acetaZOLAMIDE vs. acetoHEXAMIDE
• buPROPion vs. busPIRone
• chlorproMAZINE vs. chlorproPAMIDE
• clomiPHENE vs. clomiPRAMINE
• cycloSERINE vs. cycloSPORINE
• DAUNOrubicin vs. DOXOrubicin
• DOBUTamine vs. DOPamine
• hydrALAzine vs. hydrOXYzine
• TOLAZamide vs. TOLBUTamide
• vinBLAStine vs. vinCRIStine

See also

• Medinformatix
• Health informatics

External links

• FDA and ISMP Lists of Look-Alike Drug Name Sets With Recommended Tall Man Letters
• ISMP updates its list of drug name pairs with TALL man letters November 18, 2010