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WASHINGTON – The RxNorm standard, which is produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and provides normalized names for clinical drugs, now contains more accurate and complete connections between National Drug Codes (NDCs) that officials say could, among other things, help trigger alerts in EHRs to prevent medication errors.
[See also: Library of Medicine publishes SNOMED draft.]
It also includes, for the first time, First DataBank's set of NDCs, which are widely used in the healthcare industry. NDCs are unique product identifiers published on medication labels and packages, which are often used in pharmacy inventory control and in dispensing and billing for drugs. RxNorm has also included NDCs provided by the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Multum and Gold Standard drug information sources for a number of years.
The RxNorm is the information doctors typically include when they write a prescription because they often can't know the specific product that will be used to fill it. All medication products that contain the same active ingredients, the same strengths, and the same dose forms have the same RxNorm standard name. This standard name is connected to other information in RxNorm that can be used within EHR systems to improve patient safety.
[See also: RJ Health Systems introduces new database.]
Accurate and complete connections between NDC product codes and RxNorm standard names and identifiers have many potential uses within an individual patient's EHR. These include the use of an NDC on a medicine bottle to speed standard data entry or to trigger an alert written in the RxNorm standard that could prevent a medication error.
"We believe that this represents an important addition which improves RxNorm's quality and its usefulness in medication data entry, clinical decision support, and many activities, such as outcome and comparative effectiveness studies that rely on the ability to identify groups of patients who have taken the same medications," said Stuart Nelson, MD, creator of RxNorm.
"This is a great example of the private sector taking action to ensure that health data standards have the coverage they need to support meaningful use of electronic health records, including robust clinical decision support and efficient health information exchange," added Douglas Fridsma, MD, head of Standards and Interoperability within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
