RxNorm

Abstract: Commercial drug information systems follow a variety of naming conventions. A smooth electronic exchange of the information in these systems - not only between organizations but even within a single organization - is crucial in assuring patient safety. This exchange requires a standardized nomenclature. To meet this need, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) created RxNorm, a standardized nomenclature for clinical drugs that is one of a suite of standards designated for use in US federal government systems for the electronic exchange of clinical health information.

Abstract: Identification of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) during the post-marketing phase is one of the most important goals of drug safety surveillance Spontaneous reporting systems (SRS) data, which are the mainstay of traditional drug safety surveillance, are used for hypothesis generation and to validate the newer approaches The publicly available US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) data requires substantial curation before they can be used appropriately, and applying different strategies for data cleaning and normalization can have material impact on analysis results We provide a curated and standardized version of FAERS removing duplicate case records, applying standardized vocabularies with drug names mapped to RxNorm concepts and outcomes mapped to SNOMED-CT concepts, and pre-computed summary statistics about drug-outcome relationships for general consumption This publicly available resource, along with the source code, will accelerate drug safety research by reducing the amount of time spent performing data management on the source FAERS reports, improving the quality of the underlying data, and enabling standardized analyses using common vocabularies

Abstract: Objective: To discuss recent developments in clinical terminologies. SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms) is the world's largest clinical terminology, developed by an international consortium. LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers, Names, and Codes) is an international terminology widely used for clinical and laboratory observations. RxNorm is the standard drug terminology in the U.S. Methods and results: We present a brief review of the history, current state, and future development of SNOMED CT, LOINC and RxNorm. We also analyze their similarities and differences, and outline areas for greater interoperability among them. Conclusions: With different starting points, representation formalisms, funding sources, and evolutionary paths, SNOMED CT, LOINC, and RxNorm have evolved over the past few decades into three major clinical terminologies supporting key use cases in clinical practice. Despite their differences, partnerships have been created among their development teams to facilitate interoperability and minimize duplication of effort.