BACKGROUND Communication of an accurate and interpretable drug identifier between prescriber and pharmacist is critically important for realizing the potential benefits of electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) while minimizing its risk. The National Drug Code (NDC) is the most commonly used codified drug identifier in ambulatory care e-prescribing, but concerns have been raised regarding its u...

Dozens of drug terminologies and resources capture the drug and/or drug class information, ranging from their coverage and adequacy of representation. No transformative ways are available to link them together in a standard way, which hinders data integration and data representation for drug-related clinical and translational studies. In this paper, we introduce our preliminary work for buildin...

the effectiveness of any drug supply systems in providing a trustworthy supply of essential drugs is a critical issue. to evaluate this effectiveness, it is necessary to watch over the status of the essential medicines in any country impartially and continuously. some countries and also the world health organization (who) have codified a list of minimum medicines needed for a basic health care ...

background policy makers need models to be able to detect groups at high risk of hiv infection. incomplete records and dirty data are frequently seen in national data sets. presence of missing data challenges the practice of model development. several studies suggested that performance of imputation methods is acceptable when missing rate is moderate. one of the issues which was of less concern...

OBJECTIVE In the 6 years since the National Library of Medicine began monthly releases of RxNorm, RxNorm has become a central resource for communicating about clinical drugs and supporting interoperation between drug vocabularies. MATERIALS AND METHODS Built on the idea of a normalized name for a medication at a given level of abstraction, RxNorm provides a set of names and relationships base...

A semantic normal form (SNF) for a clinical drug, designed to represent the meaning of an expression typically seen in a practitioner's medication order, has been developed and is being created in the UMLS Metathesaurus. The long term goal is to establish a relationship for every concept in the Metathesaurus with semantic type "clinical drug" with one or more of these semantic normal forms. Fir...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the extent to which pharmacoepidemiologic groupings are homogeneous in terms of clinical properties. METHODS In our analysis, we classified drug subgroups from the pharmacoepidemiologic Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification system based on clinical drug properties. We established mappings from ATC fifth level drug entities to drug property annotations ...

With the ongoing development in the field of Medical Informatics, the availability of cross-references and the consistency of coverage between terminologies become critical requirements for clinical decision support. In this paper, we examine the possibility of developing a framework that highlights and exposes hierarchical incompatibilities between different medical terminologies in order to f...