Slide Presentation of the 2007 Annual Meeting of AHRQ

Two Approaches to Drug Names

• Pre-coordinated,
  • Complete set of (standard) drug names.
  • Only RxNorm Clinical Drugs are not enough,
    • Doctors want brand names too, sometimes.
  • May want to formulate creams, cocktails, etc.
  • Didn't seem satisfactory in testing with end-users.
  • Regenstrief system has a manually fine-tuned set of drug names.
• New: Post-coordinated approach
  • As prescriber types in the drug name, we parse it and fill a description template similar to SPL.
  • Can be used to query for matching medicines.