Detecting Misspelled Drug Names Using Transformer-Based Language Models: Model Development and External Validation

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Background Misspellings in medication names can compromise patient safety, reduce data utility, and impede large-scale data initiatives that integrate medication information from electronic health records (EHRs). Existing methods for detecting misspelled medical terms are mostly dictionary-based and can lead to high false-positive rates when correctly spelled but previously unseen (out-of-vocabulary) terms are encountered. Objective We aimed to develop and validate domain-specific, transformer-based language models for detecting misspelled drug names, with an emphasis on performance for unseen terms. Methods Using RxNorm as a standardized drug vocabulary, we created an RxNorm-augmented training corpus and developed two BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)–based models—BERTDrug and CharBERTDrug—for misspelling detection. Specifically, we randomly split 69,824 RxNorm drug names into training, development, and test sets (3:1:1) and generated k misspellings per name using text-perturbation techniques (k optimized for training; fixed at 1 for development and test sets). The models were fine-tuned on the training and development sets and evaluated using the RxNorm test set and 3586 drug names from the Long-Term Care Data Cooperative (LTCDC) database (external validation). The RxNorm test set and out-of-vocabulary LTCDC dataset (1922 terms), neither overlapping with the RxNorm training data, were used to evaluate performance on unseen terms. SpellChecker served as a dictionary-based baseline, while fastTextML and BioWordVecML, which used different subword embeddings as inputs for machine learning, served as additional baselines. Additionally, we compared model performance with GPT-4o, a generative large language model (LLM), using 2200 randomly sampled test terms. Results On the RxNorm test set, BERTDrug and CharBERTDrug outperformed the baseline models across most metrics. BERTDrug achieved the best overall performance (F1-score=0.859; area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [ROC-AUC]=0.947), followed by CharBERTDrug (F1-score=0.833; ROC-AUC=0.906). Both models also outperformed the baseline models on the out-of-vocabulary LTCDC dataset across most metrics, with CharBERTDrug performing best (F1-score=0.696; ROC-AUC=0.788), followed by BERTDrug (F1-score=0.669; ROC-AUC=0.786). In the secondary analysis, both models exceeded GPT-4o on most metrics (except Recall) for 2000 RxNorm terms. BERTDrug performed best (ROC-AUC=0.951; F1-score=0.855), followed by CharBERTDrug (ROC-AUC=0.911; F1-score=0.831) and GPT-4o (ROC-AUC=0.856; F1-score=0.721). In contrast, among 200 randomly selected LTCDC terms, GPT-4o performed best on most metrics except precision and specificity. Conclusions Domain-specific language models improved detection of misspellings in out-of-vocabulary drug names and outperformed baseline models in both internal and external evaluations. The comparison with a generative LLM suggests that domain shift may substantially reduce the advantages conferred by domain-specific training. With further fine-tuning on diverse data that capture the terminology, formatting conventions, and spelling patterns encountered across real-world clinical settings, these models could be adapted for use in other clinical databases and EHR systems to improve medication data quality for research and to support future safety-focused applications.