Drug Dosing Issues and Resources

One difficult aspect of drug nomenclature is the complexity of drug concepts. Clinicians speak fluidly about these concepts, flowing from class-based terminology (penicillins) to individual drugs (penicillin) with ease. But drug classifications are not well standardized, and some systems blend pharmacologic concepts with chemical concepts. For example, consider a system which uses "beta-adrenergic receptor blockers" and "fluoroquinolones". One speaks to the pharmacologic target while the other refers to a shared chemical composition. Clinicians understand and interpret these differences, but electronic applications have more difficulty. RxNorm is an effort to standardize these naming conventions for an individual drug. These concepts are generally included in proprietary vocabularies, but there is little consensus among them. These may complicate efforts to establish comparisons on adverse drug events, allergy, and other comparative features among members of a class. Class level groupings are included in SnoMed and may provide a basis of standardization. For this reason efforts to standardize to a single class nomenclature are important and necessary.