title: Methods for managing variation in clinical drug names.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To develop normalization methods for managing the variation in clinical drug names.
  
  
  METHODS
  Manual examination of drug names from RxNorm and local variants collected from formularies led to the identification of three types of drug-specific normalization rules: expansion of abbreviations (e.g., tab to tablet);reformatting of specific elements (e.g., space between number and unit); and removal of salt variants (e.g., succinate from metoprolol succinate).
  
  
  RESULTS
  After drug-specific normalization, recall of 3397 previously non-matching names from formularies reaches 45% overall (70% of some subsets), compared to 10-20% after generic normalization. Ambiguity has not increased significantly in the RxNorm dataset.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A limited number of drug-specific normalization operations provide significant improvement over general language normalization.
authors.affiliation: National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Peters
authors.forename: Joan E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Kapusnik-Uner
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Bodenreider
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D009275:Names; D062245:RxNorm; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled