title: Evaluation of RxNorm for Medication Clinical Decision Support.
abstract: We evaluated the potential use of RxNorm to provide standardized representations of generic drug name and route of administration to facilitate management of drug lists for clinical decision support (CDS) rules. We found a clear representation of generic drug name but not route of administration. We identified several issues related to data quality, including erroneous or missing defined relationships, and the use of different concept hierarchies to represent the same drug. More importantly, we found extensive semantic precoordination of orthogonal concepts related to route and dose form, which would complicate the use of RxNorm for drug-based CDS. This study demonstrated that while RxNorm is a valuable resource for the standardization of medications used in clinical practice, additional work is required to enhance the terminology so that it can support expanded use cases, such as managing drug lists for CDS.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN ; Office of Information and Knowledge Management, Rochester, MN.
authors.forename: Robert R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: Freimuth
authors.affiliation: Pharmacy Services Information Systems; Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.
authors.forename: Kelly
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wix
authors.affiliation: Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN.
authors.forename: Qian
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Pharmacy Services Information Systems; Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Siska
authors.affiliation: Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Department of Health Sciences Research, Rochester, MN.
authors.forename: Christopher G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Chute
mesh_terms: D000925:Anticoagulants / Q000627:therapeutic use; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D004360:Drug Therapy, Computer-Assisted; D005569:Formularies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D062245:RxNorm; D020246:Venous Thrombosis / Q000517:prevention & control
chemical_list: D000925:Anticoagulants