Comprehensive Drug Database Use

Here are definitions from the NLM site for RX Norm.

What is RxNorm?

RxNorm, a standardized nomenclature for clinical drugs and drug delivery devices, is produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). In this context, a clinical drug is a pharmaceutical product given to (or taken by) a patient with a therapeutic or diagnostic intent. A drug delivery device is a pack that contains multiple clinical drugs or clinical drugs designed to be administered in a specified sequence. In RxNorm, the name of a clinical drug combines its ingredients, strengths, and/or form.

While ingredient and strength have straightforward meanings, clarification of what is meant by form may be needed. In RxNorm, the form is the physical form in which the drug is administered or is specified to be administered in a prescription or order. The RxNorm clinical drug name does not refer to the size of the package, the form in which the product was manufactured, its form when it arrived at the dispensary or the intended route.

RxNorm’s standard names for clinical drugs and drug delivery devices are connected to the varying names of drugs present in many different controlled vocabularies within the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus, including those in commercially available drug information sources. These connections are intended to facilitate interoperability among the computerized systems that record or process data dealing with clinical drugs.

Purpose of RxNorm

Because every drug information system that is commercially available today follows somewhat different naming conventions, a standardized nomenclature is needed for the smooth exchange of information, not only between organizations, but even within the same organization. For example, a hospital may use one system for ordering and another for inventory management. Still another system might be used to record dose adjustments or to check drug interactions. Several cooperating hospitals might have different systems, and find their data incompatible.

A standardized nomenclature that relates itself to terms from other sources can serve as a means for determining when names from different source vocabularies are synonymous (at an appropriate level of abstraction). The goal of RxNorm is to allow various systems using different drug nomenclatures to share data efficiently at the appropriate level of abstraction.