Posts about RxNorm drug terminology and database
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More than you might think...
Open drug data is a powerful resource for healthcare, pharmacy, and research professionals. While it has some gaps, it serves as a foundation for innovation, providing key insights without the barriers of proprietary systems. With the right tools to fill in these gaps, open drug data can rival — and even surpass — commercial databases in accessibility, interoperability, and fostering innovation.
RxNorm is an invaluable resource created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It is a standard nomenclature to represent drug products, providing semantic interoperability across many different drug vocabularies and fueling medication-related clinical decision support. However, the way the data within RxNorm is structured is pretty abstract and really difficult to understand without spending several hours reading various different pages of documentation on NLM's website.
For instance, take a look at the three RxNorm database tables below and tell me how you would find all of the national drug codes (NDCs) for all of the clinical drug products that contain lisinopril as an ingredient. Bet you can't figure it out without reviewing at least 4 different NLM sources of documentation.
