Abstract:
Confusion of similar drug names can easily lead to medication errors. Text enhancement design for similar drug names is one of the common methods to reduce visual confusion of drug names. However, few empirical studies focus on the impact of the visual presentation mechanism of drug name text in visual distinction of similar Chinese drug names. Our study aimed to examine the effects of text enhancement (boldface, red, contrast, larger font size, no enhancement), name length (long, short), and similarity (high, medium, low) on visual differentiation performance of Chinese look-alike drug names based on a three-way within group experimental design. The subjects were 30 students majoring in medicine, their tasks were to determine, as quickly and accurately as possible, whether the names of two drugs successively presented on the screen were the same. The dependent variables included response time, accuracy rate, and perceived confidence. The results showed that using larger font size in the different parts of drug name pairs could significantly shorten the response time. The longer the drug name length and the more similar the drug name pairs were, the longer the response time was. Text enhancement can significantly improve differentiation accuracy; the more similar the drug name was, the lower the accuracy was. In addition, text enhancement significantly improved subjects’ confidence in correctly distinguishing look-alike drug names. The results support the effectiveness of text enhancement in highlighting differences between look-alike Chinese drug names for drug safety.