The RxNorm standard clinical drug vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) now contains more accurate and complete connections between National Drug Codes (NDCs) and standard non-proprietary names of medications recommended for use in electronic health records (EHRs). It also includes, for the first time, First DataBank's set of NDCs. First DataBank is a provider of drug databases that are widely used in the healthcare industry.
NDCs are product identifiers assigned by manufacturers and packagers of drugs in the US. They are published on medication labels and packages and are often used in pharmacy inventory control and in dispensing and billing for drugs.
Accurate and complete connections between NDC product codes and RxNorm standard names and identifiers have many potential uses within an individual patient's EHR. These include the use of an NDC on a medicine bottle to speed standard data entry or to trigger an alert written in the RxNorm standard that could prevent a medication error.
At present, there is reportedly no single source that contains the NDCs for all medications currently marketed in the US. RxNorm has included NDCs provided by the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Multum and Gold Standard drug information sources for a number of years. Starting with the Feb. 7, 2011 release, RxNorm now includes a revised, filtered version of the NDC data that segregates obsolete NDCs from those currently in the marketplace. It also includes, for the first time, First DataBank's set of NDCs, which are widely used in the healthcare industry.
In a recently published study sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and performed by the RAND Corporation and others, RxNorm was found to have entries for essentially all of the drugs in a sample of 19,743 ambulatory e-prescriptions (electronic prescriptions for patients seen in clinics or physician offices). Some e-prescriptions in the study sample failed to match automatically to an NDC in RxNorm, however. The inclusion of the First DataBank NDCs is likely to eliminate this gap.
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