I spoke with someone about your project last Thursday and I understand that the National Library of Medicine may be working on something to help get some of the variability in the FDA file due to the differences between the drug company's reporting out of the FDA files. I have someone to contact to find out more about it. However, I don't think that will soon enough to help you.
I think what you are doing is to aid in VOE and VistA adoption. You and I seem to be alone in that belief at the moment because most folks wonder why we just don't put in the drugs at a given site and be done with it. However, it is not that simple, especially when there is more than one physician and not all of the docs are not geeks. Press on and more power to you. It is clearly a Herculean effort. Thank you so much for doing it. On Monday 24 April 2006 17:05, Kevin Toppenberg wrote: Well, I have reached a bit of a milestone in my FDA drug import project, so thought I would write about it here. I have done the following: 1. Gotten the FDA drug database (in ~5 separate files), and imported each file into temporary files. 2. Scanned the existing drug database for pre-existing drugs and marked these FDA drugs to be ignored. 3. I scan for new ingredients and add those needed. 4. I create new entries in the VA Generic file (a GENERIC name is a long list of ingredients) if needed, or match to pre-existing entries. 5. For the new drugs, I scan for *similar* pre-existing drug, based on ingredients and names. 6. For all new drugs, a drug class should be assigned. I use the drug class of the similar pre-existing drug as a potential drug classification. This isn't assigned, however, until approved by the user. I have had to write tools to achieve each of the tasks above. Its taken about 4,000 lines of code (expanded format) for this. So what I am particularily happy is that I have just finished classifying all the new drugs. I started out with 12,000 (!) new drugs to classify and I never thought I would finish. But with some added tools, I have been able to finish it in about 4 days. So all my changes have been to set up a custom file: TMG FDA IMPORT COMPILED. From here, new records will be added to the VA PRODUCT file. The next step will be to compile the new additions into the DRUG file (#50), filtering for duplicates etc.. And from there, I hope that I will be able to use Norman Dodd's code to make the new drugs show up in CPRS. Since I have started all this, the FDA has released a new installment of the database (they release every 3 months). So I will run through the entire process again with the new data, and hopefully there won't more than a handful of new drugs. And then I can do this 4 times a year to keep current, and will probably be able to automate it. Anyway, I hope that I am something like 60% done with this project. Kevin ------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid0709&bid&3057&dat1642 _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members -- Nancy Anthracite ------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
