[Hardhats-members] Importing FDA national drug files: Request for Comments

[Kevin Toppenberg]

Cameron has said that the VA is working such that "someday" peripheral sites will get updates to National drug file entries at near real time via HL-7 messages.

But until then I am thinking about importing the files distributed by the FDA, found here:
http://www.fda.gov/cder/ndc/

It looks like a straightforward database dump.
It consists of 7 interlinking files in ASCII format

I thought that I would do the following:
1. Create new files in Fileman directly mirroring the structure of the FDA files.
2. Import the data into Fileman
3. Use these new, independant files to populate/update/cleanup my VA PRODUCT file.

Is this a good idea?
Any thoughts?

Kevin