Pharmacy Blog

National Library of Medicine Publishes RxTerms, Drug Name Terminology linked to RxNorm

terry.meehan@medsphere.com — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:52:14 GMT

A new "interface terminology", dubbed RxTerms, is available for downloading and testing from the NLM. The dataset is derived from RxNorm,

the US national terminology standard for clinical drugs. RxTerms provides drug name information intended for use with electronic prescribing

and medication histories as needed in Personal Health Records.

Attributes of RxTerms include:

It's free.
Links to RxNorm which can provide the EMR with RxNorm clinical identifiers.
Intelligent data entry - designed to avoid big picklists with excessively long names.
Has commonly used synonyms and abbreviations (e.g. HCTZ for hydrochlorothiazide) .
There is "tall man" lettering (e.g. ChlorproMAZINE and ChlorproPAMIDE).
Claims 99% coverage of both generic and brand names for most commonly prescribed U.S. drugs.
It excludes drugs from RxNorm that are obsolete or unavailable in the U.S.

The current dataset has over 29,000 entries. Below is a snapshot of a couple of representative entries.

This view is from a quick report created in MS Access.

If you use Firefox, you can try a demo on the NLM site here.

Patient Selection Options in OpenVista Meds

terry.meehan@medsphere.com — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:09:02 GMT

Pharmacy users approach current visit patient profile retrieval with a different workflow

and perspective than users of CPRS and BCMA. A key distinction is that a pharmacy

user usually services a larger population of patients at any one time.

OpenVista Meds^®, MSC’s GUI pharmacy application, has a proposed design for patient

selection that allows the user to enter partial criteria and get a list of patients that meet the

criteria. Following is a mock-up prototype:

If more than one patient meets the search criteria, a list like the following would be generated.

The user selects a patient from the list and the list persists until cleared or refreshed.

One of the proposed search criteria, “Days since discharge” is intended to allow the user

to easily retrieve a patient who was recently discharged. Otherwise, discharged patients

are excluded from the search. Pre-admits are another matter.

With regard to retrieving the recently discharged patients, what is the use case for this

capability? One scenario that comes to mind: the patient was discharged in the system

before they actually left and the nurse wants to give a dose of a med “for the road”. Another

case is where the profile needs to be accessed for billing purposes after discharge. Are

these valid scenarios? Are there others?

Assuming that retrieval of discharged patients is useful, what happens when location criteria

are entered? Should I be able to enter ICU in the Unit with discharge days set to 1 day to get

a list of current and recently discharged ICU patients? If so, and if that is useful, does VistA

support such a query? If it doesn't, that is, if logically a patient cannot have a location and a

discharge date, what should happen?

Answers,questions, comments appreciated.

This thread is being moved to the OpenVista Meds Roadmap location as a discussion. Please post any further comments there. Medsphere.org is a work in progress. Don't comment here. Click on this link and then click on Reply,

So what is pharmacy informatics?

terry.meehan@medsphere.com — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:38:05 GMT

For starters, definitions from Wikipedia:

Pharmacy is the health profession that links the health sciences with the chemical sciences, and it is charged with ensuring the safe and effective use of medication. The scope of pharmacy practice includes more traditional roles such as compounding and dispensing medications, and it also includes more modern services related to patient care, including clinical services, reviewing medications for safety and efficacy, and providing drug information. Pharmacists, therefore, are the experts on drug therapy and are the primary health professionals who optimize medication use to provide patients with positive health outcomes. The term is also applied to an establishment used for such purposes.

Informatics is the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information. It also develops its own conceptual and theoretical foundations and utilizes foundations developed in other fields. Since the advent of computers, individuals and organizations increasingly process information digitally. This has led to the study of informatics that has computational, cognitive and social aspects, including study of the social impact of information technologies.

Pharmacy informatics is the application of computers to the storage, retrieval and analysis of drug and prescription information. Pharmacy informaticists work with pharmacy information management systems that help the pharmacist make excellent decisions about patient drug therapies with respect to, medical insurance records, drug interactions, as well as prescription and patient information.

Pharmacy informatics is the study of interactions between people, their work processes and engineered systems within health care with a focus on pharmaceutical care and improved patient safety.The Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) defines pharmacy informatics as, "the scientific field that focuses on medication-related data and knowledge within the continuum of healthcare systems - including its acquisition, storage, analysis, use and dissemination - in the delivery of optimal medication-related patient care and health outcomes"

My other favorite topic: what music to listen to while snowboarding, probably belongs on a different site, but I may bring it up on a winter powder day.