Towards a Clinical Decision Support System for Drug Allergy Management: Are Existing Drug Reference Terminologies...

Drug allergy cross-reactivity checking is an important component of electronic health record systems. Currently, a single, open-source medication dictionary that can provide this function does not exist. In this study, we assessed the feasibility of using RxNorm and NDF-RT (National Drug File--Reference Terminology) for allergy management decision support. We evaluated the performance of using the Pharmacological Class, Mechanism of Action and Chemical Structure NDF-RT classifications in discriminating between safe and cross-reactive alternatives to a sample of common drug allergens. The positive predictive values for the three approaches were 96.3%, 99.3% and 96.2% respectively. The negative predictive values were 94.7%, 56.8% and 92.6%. Our findings suggest that in the absence of an established medication allergy classification system, using the Pharmacologic Class and Chemical Structure classifications in NDF-RT may still be effective for discriminating between safe and cross-reactive alternatives to potential allergens.