On Tuesday 20 June 2006 10:14, Geoff Sayer wrote: > How will the medications be coded and classified in the knowledge base and > how will the clinical systems talk to this knowledge base? There is no > standard medication code set at the product level that is then classified > at generic, therapeutic class etc. that all vendors are using. NEHTA and > others are obviously keen to get this sorted.
There are at least two standardized drug "coding" systems: a) ATC codes b) INN option a) is suffering from duplicity / non-uniqueness, but that is a problem not too hard to overcome option b) has no class hierarchy, just names Since I am not aware of any need to include brand names into a drug interaction database, using international non-proprietary names as "unique keys" stands to reason, doesn't it? In the (now sadly almost defunct) drugref project we constructed an "ATC dictionary" where we (that is me and Jay Gallagher from the OSCAR project) mapped a huge number of terms from various sources (e.g. Acetaminophen / Paracetamol, Frusemide / Furosemide, Lignocaine/Xylocaine, or composite drugs like Co-Trimoxazole) - it is far from complete but might be a starting point for something usable. This "dictionary" could include brandnames too, mapped to one or more ATC codes each. The initial work we did is available via CVS (http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewcvs/php-drugref/atcdict/?root=php-drugref), including a browser based interface to facilitate manual mapping of missing terms Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
