title: Mapping Partners Master Drug Dictionary to RxNorm using an NLP-based approach.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To develop an automated method based on natural language processing (NLP) to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a mapping between RxNorm and a local medication terminology for interoperability and meaningful use purposes.
  
  
  METHODS
  We mapped 5961 terms from Partners Master Drug Dictionary (MDD) and 99 of the top prescribed medications to RxNorm. The mapping was conducted at both term and concept levels using an NLP tool, called MTERMS, followed by a manual review conducted by domain experts who created a gold standard mapping. The gold standard was used to assess the overall mapping between MDD and RxNorm and evaluate the performance of MTERMS.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Overall, 74.7% of MDD terms and 82.8% of the top 99 terms had an exact semantic match to RxNorm. Compared to the gold standard, MTERMS achieved a precision of 99.8% and a recall of 73.9% when mapping all MDD terms, and a precision of 100% and a recall of 72.6% when mapping the top prescribed medications.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The challenges and gaps in mapping MDD to RxNorm are mainly due to unique user or application requirements for representing drug concepts and the different modeling approaches inherent in the two terminologies. An automated approach based on NLP followed by human expert review is an efficient and feasible way for conducting dynamic mapping.
authors.affiliation: Clinical Informatics Research & Development, Partners HealthCare System, Inc., Wellesley, USA. Lzhou2@partners.org
authors.forename: Li
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Joseph M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Plasek
authors.forename: Lisa M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Mahoney
authors.forename: Frank Y
authors.initials: FY
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Dana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: DiMaggio
authors.forename: Roberto A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Rocha
mesh_terms: D004019:Dictionaries, Pharmaceutic as Topic; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations / Q000145:classification*; D062245:RxNorm; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled
chemical_list: D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations