Slide Presentation of the 2007 Annual Meeting of AHRQ

Drug Terminologies

• Terminologies support some reasoning
  • about existence
    • What drugs, with what ingredients, packaging exist?
  • about abstractions, generalizations
    • Drug classes and their members.
    • "Clinical Drugs"
  • FDA Listing, Multum, RxNorm
• Terminologies alone do not cover reasoning about purpose, effect, interactions etc.
  • More complete knowledge bases are needed
  • NDF-RT includes some pharmacological knowledge
    • may-treat,
    • mechanism-of-action,
    • physiologic-effect,
    • chemical-class
    • some pharmacokinetics