Module 37: Look-Alike / Sound-Alike (LASA) & High-Alert Drug Safety

In your pharmacy career, you’ve been trained to be vigilant about look-alike/sound-alike drugs. You know the classic pairs: hydroxyzine and hydralazine, Adderall and Inderal. In the hospital, this foundational knowledge is stretched to its limit. The sheer number of injectable medications, the similarity in packaging and labeling from manufacturers, and the fast-paced, high-stress environment create a perfect storm for potentially fatal medication errors.

This module elevates the concept of LASA from a simple memory exercise to a systematic, environmental, and procedural science. We will move beyond just recognizing confusing drug names and dive into the practical, real-world strategies that hospitals implement to build layers of safety into the medication-use process. You will learn to see the pharmacy and the nursing unit through the lens of human factors engineering, identifying risks in storage, labeling, and technology that can lead to catastrophic mix-ups.

This is the retail shelf look-alike problem—except every error here goes straight into a vein. This module provides the street-smart survival guide to ensure you are a proactive force for safety, capable of identifying and mitigating these critical risks before they can ever reach a patient.