Kelly Zeng

Normalized names for clinical drugs: RxNorm at 6 years.

OBJECTIVE In the 6 years since the National Library of Medicine began monthly releases of RxNorm, RxNorm has become a central resource for communicating about clinical drugs and supporting interoperation between drug vocabularies. MATERIALS AND METHODS Built on the idea of a normalized name for a medication at a given level of abstraction, RxNorm provides a set of names and relationships based on 11 different external source vocabularies. The standard model enables decision support to take place for a variety of uses at the appropriate level of abstraction. With the incorporation of National Drug File Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) from the Veterans Administration, even more sophisticated decision support has become possible. DISCUSSION While related products such as RxTerms, RxNav, MyMedicationList, and MyRxPad have been recognized as helpful for various uses, tasks such as identifying exactly what is and is not on the market remain a challenge.

Building a Standards-Based and Collaborative E-Prescribing Tool MyRxPad

MyRxPad is a prototype application developed at the National Library of Medicine that helps prescribers lower some of the e-prescribing adoption barriers and encourages an early positive experience of e-prescribing. We envision a practitioner-patient collaborative approach towards e-prescribing: patients play an active role in their healthcare by maintaining up-to-date and accurate medication lists. Prescribers make well-informed and safe prescribing decisions based on personal medication records contributed by patients. In the paper, we discuss the development of MyRxPad, a vehicle for collaborations with patients using MyMedicationList. Integration with personal medication records in the context of e-prescribing is thus enabled. An early version of MyRxPad is available at http://rxp.nlm.nih.gov.

Building a standards-based and collaborative e-prescribing tool: MyRxPad

MyRxPad is a prototype application developed at the National Library of Medicine that helps prescribers lower some of the e-prescribing adoption barriers and encourages an early positive experience of e-prescribing. We envision a practitioner-patient collaborative approach towards e-prescribing: patients play an active role in their healthcare by maintaining up-to-date and accurate medication lists. Prescribers make well-informed and safe prescribing decisions based on personal medication records contributed by patients. In the paper, we discuss the development of MyRxPad, a vehicle for collaborations with patients using MyMedicationList. Integration with personal medication records in the context of e-prescribing is thus enabled. An early version of MyRxPad is available at http://rxp.nlm.nih.gov.