title: Managing Medical Vocabulary Updates in a Clinical Data Warehouse: An RxNorm Case Study.
abstract: Use of terminology standards facilitates aggregating data from multiple sources for information retrieval, exchange and analysis. However, medical vocabularies are continuously updated and incorporating those changes consistently into clinical data warehouses requires rigorous methodology. To integrate pharmacy data from two hospital pharmacy information systems the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (STRIDE) project mapped medication orders to RxNorm content using the RxNorm drug model. In order to keep the data relevant and up-to-date, we developed a strategy for updating to RxNorm, while preserving the original meaning and mapping of the legacy data. This case study discusses managing the vocabulary update by following the RxNorm content maintenance strategy and supplementing it with operations to retain access to its drug model information.
authors.affiliation: Center for Clinical Informatics, Stanford University, Stanford CA.
authors.forename: Tanya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Podchiyska
authors.forename: Penni
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hernandez
authors.forename: Todd
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ferris
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Weber
authors.forename: Henry J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Lowe
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D062245:RxNorm; D018511:Systems Integration; D014825:Vocabulary; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled