Integrating VA's NDF-RT Drug Terminology with PharmGKB: Preliminary Results

Biomedical terminology and vocabulary standards play an important role in enabling consistent, comparable, and meaningful sharing of data within and across institutional boundaries, as well as ensuring semantic interoperability. The Veterans Affairs (VA) National Drug File Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) is a federally recommended standardized terminology resource encompassing medications, ingredients, and a hierarchy for high-level drug classes. In this study, we investigate the drug-disease relationships in NDF-RT and determine how PharmGKB can be leveraged to augment NDF-RT, and vice-versa. Our preliminary results indicate that with additional curation and analyses, information contained in both knowledge resources can be mutually integrated.