Interoperability of Medication Classification Systems: Lessons Learned Mapping Established Pharmacologic Classes (EPCs) to SNOMED CT.

Interoperability among medication classification systems is known to be limited. We investigated the mapping of the Established Pharmacologic Classes (EPCs) to SNOMED CT. We compared lexical and instance-based methods to an expert-reviewed reference standard to evaluate contributions of these methods.

Categorical information in pharmaceutical terminologies.

Drug information sources use category labels to assist in navigating and organizing information. Some category labels describe drugs from multiple perspectives (e.g.

VA National Drug File Reference Terminology: a cross-institutional content coverage study.

Background: Content coverage studies provide valuable information to potential users of terminologies. We detail the VA National Drug File Reference Terminology's (NDF-RT) ability to represent dictated medication list phrases from the Mayo Clinic. NDF-RT is a description logic-based resource created to support clinical operations at one of the largest healthcare providers in the US.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Enterprise Reference Terminology strategic overview.

The Veterans Health Affairs (VHA) branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs has undertaken an Enterprise Reference Terminology (ERT). VHA, arguably the largest integrated healthcare provider in the United States, has completely computerized virtually all clinical transactions, including physician orders and documentation. The VA is now integrating its clinical records across hundreds of sites of care by means of a Health Data Repository (HDR) project.

Adequacy of representation of the National Drug File Reference Terminology Physiologic Effects reference hierarchy for commonly prescribed medications.

The National Drug File Reference Terminology contains a novel reference hierarchy to describe physiologic effects (PE) of drugs. The PE reference hierarchy contains 1697 concepts arranged into two broad categories; organ specific and generalized systemic effects. This investigation evaluated the appropriateness of the PE concepts for classifying a random selection of commonly prescribed medications.

A semantic normal form for clinical drugs in the UMLS: early experiences with the VANDF.

A semantic normal form (SNF) for a clinical drug, designed to represent the meaning of an expression typically seen in a practitioner's medication order, has been developed and is being created in the UMLS Metathesaurus. The long term goal is to establish a relationship for every concept in the Metathesaurus with semantic type "clinical drug" with one or more of these semantic normal forms. First steps have been taken using the Veterans Administration National Drug File (VANDF).

Initializing the VA medication reference terminology using UMLS metathesaurus co-occurrences.

We developed and evaluated a UMLS Metathesaurus Co-occurrence mining algorithm to connect medications and diseases they may treat. Based on 16 years of co-occurrence data, we created 977 candidate drug-disease pairs for a sample of 100 ingredients (50 commonly prescribed and 50 selected at random). Our evaluation showed that more than 80% of the candidate drug-disease pairs were rated "APPROPRIATE" by physician raters.