At 10:42 am +1000 20/6/06, Horst Herb wrote:
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
But surely something like this could be maintained in the wiki model???
--
Dr Ian R Cheong, BMedSc, FRACGP, GradDipCompSc, MBA(Exec)
Health Informatics Consultant, Brisbane, Australia
Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(for urgent matters, please send a copy to my practice email as well:
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
PRIVACY NOTE
I am happy for others to forward on email sent by me to public email lists.
Please ask my permission first if you wish to forward private email
to other parties.
_______________________________________________
Gpcg_talk mailing list
[email protected]
http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
