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Published on: December 11, 2016
Methods for managing variation in clinical drug names
Lee Peters1, Joan E Kapusnik-Uner, Olivier Bodenreider
1National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Objectives:
To develop normalization methods for managing the variation in clinical drug names.
Methods:
Manual examination of drug names from RxNorm and local variants collected from formularies led to the identification of three types of drug-specific normalization rules: expansion of abbreviations (e.g., tab to tablet);reformatting of specific elements (e.g., space between number and unit); and removal of salt variants (e.g., succinate from metoprolol succinate).
Results:
After drug-specific normalization, recall of 3397 previously non-matching names from formularies reaches 45% overall (70% of some subsets), compared to 10-20% after generic normalization. Ambiguity has not increased significantly in the RxNorm dataset.
Conclusions:
A limited number of drug-specific normalization operations provide significant improvement over general language normalization.
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