The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), based in suburban Philadelphia, is a nonprofit organization devoted to preventing medication errors and the safe use of medications. Its medication error prevention efforts began in 1975 with a column in "Hospital Pharmacy" to inform healthcare professionals and others about medication error prevention. ISMP operates a voluntary practitioner error-reporting program to tabulate errors nationally, understand their causes, and share “lessons learned” with the healthcare community, known as the Medication Errors Reporting Program (MERP), operated by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) in cooperation with ISMP. In addition, ISMP's corporate subsidiary, Med-E.R.R.S. (Medical Error Recognition and Revision Strategies), works directly and confidentially with the pharmaceutical industry to prevent errors that stem from confusing or misleading naming, labeling, packaging, and device design. The ISMP list of error-prone abbreviations is distributed nationally.