Many painkiller prescription errors caused by similar looking, sounding monikers.

HealthDay reported, "Confusion caused by look-alike and sound-alike names contributes to a large number of the painkiller prescription errors that occur in hospitals," according to a study published in the January issue of The Journal of Pain. Researchers reviewed "714,290 orders for painkillers in a large database of pharmacist-detected-and-

prevented prescribing errors." The researchers found that "the overall error rate was 2.87 per 1,000 prescriptions (2,044 cases) and the rate of potentially serious prescribing errors was 0.63 per 1,000 (449 cases)."