On Tuesday 20 June 2006 11:24, Cedric Meyerowitz wrote: > I believe it very important to include Brand names. To force Dr to enter > Generic names again increases the red tape. Although some Dr only > prescribe generically, others don't. Since the current Medical software I > use & the previous one I used does check Generic & Trade names, it will be > a big step backwards if you go down that path
Doubtless. Nobody intends to bother the user with selecting particular terms. Indeed my own system allows me for example to just enter "pnc", which will be expanded internally to "phenoxymethylpenicillin potassium" etc. What I was saying is that as *primary key* international nonproprietary names (INN) can be used: - they are complete (including even drugs that never have been on the market - they are unique for each drug (component) Mapping brand names etc. to their INN components is something that of course needs to be taken care of, even we did it in our experimental "proof of concept" thing (check http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewcvs/php-drugref/atcdict/datadump/atcdict.sql?rev=1.1&root=php-drugref&view=log) But it shouldn't be the task of the NPS to map brand names to generic terms - if they focus on producing a quality interaction database of drug interactions accessible by ATC code or INN (or similar open standard of naming drugs) and make it available, drug database vendors / producers or even software vendors can focus on mapping their terms to these standard terms To the user it should be all transparent. All the user does is select drugs via the user interface of his choice by the terms of his choice, and should not be bothered by the inner workings of the systems which will translate the user choice terms into the standard terms Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
