Drug to Drug Interaction Database

Are you heavily involved in making the critical decisions for EMR development and the need to include the best drug information, along with the best vendor support?

Several weeks ago I wrote:

Are you the owner or manager of an ambulatory EMR company?   What keeps you up late at night?   Worried about getting your product to the market as quickly as possible and keeping your costs under control?  Worried about certification?   No doubt you have some thoughts about reducing medical errors by including the best drug information and internal built-in logic.   More and more EMR and EHR  business owners and general managers are turning to Lexicomp to solve their drug information needs.

In a few short years,  Lexicomp has been the fastest growing provider of drug information to the EMR market.  As I said in a previous post:

In addition to supplying the expected information such as drug-drug and drug-allergy interactions, adverse drug events, RxNorm mapping, generic drug lists, drug nomenclature, and more.  Lexi-Data offers an incredibly easy to use data structure and API's and most importantly,  Lexicomp is unparalleled in its customer service and providing assistance in the development process. If you are developing a new EMR and need a drug information supplier, make sure that Lexi is on your list.

And if you are thinking about building your own ePrescribing module,  I call your attention to a posting my colleague Matt Bennardo published last week:

As EHR vendors find their products growing and signing up more users, many start to think about moving from using a third-party eprescribing solution to building their own. The reasons for making this switch are many:

• As your user base grows, eprescribing fees grow too
• Bring features in-house makes it easier to respond to specific customer needs
• A third-party solution is a risk, as you never can be sure what will happen in the market

One of the first steps in building your own eprescriber is to find a data provider who can supply you with medication lists and other information that Surescripts requires to certify your tool. Lexicomp is one such provider. They've been focused on providing drug data direct to clinicians for over thirty years, but now they can also supply you with database-ready information to power an eprescriber.

Lexicomp's customers have used their data to certify EMRs and EHRs with ONC testing bodies like Drummond, CCHIT, and Infogard. Their customers have also certified eprescribers using Lexicomp data with Surescripts. And best of all, Lexicomp's flexible pricing and easy implementation allows firms of all sizes to get up and running smoothly and quickly.

Contact Lexicomp using the links on this page today for more information.

Healthcare providers have always relied on Lexicomp’s clinical information to provide them with answers to questions about drug interactions. It is important that providers have a trusted resource to find information about the potential, risk, and mechanism of drug and natural product interactions, and methods to manage these risks in their patient’s regimen. The key to Lexicomp’s drug interaction content comes from a strong knowledge base of understanding the pharmacokinetics of drug interactions and a scientific approach to predicting interactions.   Lexicomp’s comprehensive suite of clinical information concerning drug-drug and drug-food interactions is one of the key reasons why EMR vendors use Lexi-Data for clinical decision support to meet Meaningful Use certification requirements.

Lexi-Data’s drug-drug interaction API provides developers many opportunities to customize the display of drug interaction information, offers a severity rating for each interaction, an “advice” header, and a textual description of the significance, nature, and management of the interaction. Lexi-Data also helps manage alert fatigue with the ability to customize interaction alerts for different views. 

Lexicomp will be exhibiting at HIMSS 2012 in Las Vegas from February 20 - 24. Stop by for a visit at Booth #5134 and learn more about the preferred choice of drug information databases!

Lexicomp will be attending HIMSS 2012 in Las Vegas.  This will be a great opportunity for any EMR, Hospital, or Consumer Health Site to visit booth #5134 and learn about our solutions for implementing decision support for drug interactions, duplicate therapy, drug allergies, and dose range checking, as well as drug databases, and patient education information for consumers.   

At HIMSS 2012 there will be live demonstrations showing how our drug databases can be implemented and customized to meet the various specific needs of EMR vendors. Stop by and see us if you are a current customer or are looking to implement drug information or clinical decision support into your application.

• Allows for specific clinical decision support functions, including drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction checking
• Has consumer-facing patient education materials
• Is compliant with the RxNorm 
• Include comprehensives reference information for the US including drug generic name, drug brand name, drug classifications, and eventually clinical dosage guidelines for calculating pediatric and adult doses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are you developing EMRs and practice management systems where speed to market is critical?   One of the modules of such systems is the inclusion of drug information.    Since this is neither the expertise of your developers nor your content people,  it is important to identify the preferred drug information provider early in the process.   Four criteria are critical in making this decision.   First, quality of information.  Second,  flexibility of design and APIs.   Third, simplicity of data structure.   Fourth, and very important, customer support during the development period and after release.    More and more EMRs are now using Lexicomp drug information as part of their offering.  And there is a reason for that.

Lexi-Data is the foundation of Lexicomp's clinical decision support architecture is quickly becoming the standard for when companies need an up-to-date comprehensive drug database.  This database provides patient specific alerts and referential content to support sound treatment decisions in areas such as drug interaction checking (drug-drug and drug-food), drug allergy checking, therapeutic duplication checking, RxNorm Mappings, supports Surescripts Certification,  Drug Classifications, dose range checking (adult and pediatric), Patient Education, Pediatric and neonatal drug interactions and more. 

 

ePrescribing is offered as a way to prevent medication errors that arise due to difficulties in reading or understanding handwritten prescriptions. ePrescribing could also reduce adverse drug events (ADEs) by making information such as drug interactions and contraindications available to prescribers at the time they are preparing a prescription.

Lexi-Data is the foundation of Lexicomp's clinical decision support architecture is quickly becoming the standard for when companies need an up-to-date comprehensive drug database.  This database provides patient specific alerts and referential content to support sound treatment decisions in areas such as drug interaction checking (drug-drug and drug-food), drug allergy checking, therapeutic duplication checking, RxNorm Mappings, supports Surescripts Certification,  Drug Classifications, dose range checking (adult and pediatric), Patient Education, and more. 

EMR and EHR vendors are discovering that the responsiveness of their data providers can have a big impact on their ability to get certification or get to market. This is especially true in drug interaction databases, where the quality of the data can affect crucial goals like Meaningful Use certification or SureScripts eprescribing certification.

Even beyond certification, a data provider can affect how quickly you can develop new features, respond to customer requests, or even whether you can develop new and necessary functionality at all. In many ways, a drug information vendor is one of a health IT developer's most important partners.

What if the partnership doesn't work out?
Real problems can arise if this partner is unresponsive or doesn't provide the expected level of customer service and new feature development. An EHR or EMR can literally be left treading water in situations such as these. What to do? Here are three tips.

1. "Bolt on" additional functionality: For some functionality, it's possible to lease an already-certified third-party solution that will help you meet short-term needs if your own development is stalled. The classic case for this electronic prescribing -- many EMR developers use pre-existing third-party eprescribing modules to get them to market faster while developing their own. One provider of such modules is DoseSpot.

2. Use web services to easily integrate multiple sources: Sometimes a single source just doesn't have everything you need, but maintaining multiple in-house databases can be costly and time-consuming. For specific bits of information you want to add -- for instance, patient education documents in foreign languages -- it may be easiest to access a second vendor using web services. This puts the responsibility for maintaining the data on the vendor, and leaves you with a much smaller development and maintenance task. One drug data provider, Lexicomp, now supplies much core functionality through web services, including all major Meaningful Use Stage 1 items.

3. Cut the anchor as soon as you can: Sometimes all you can do is look for another provider. The two items above can help you in some circumstances, but for core functionality you may need to cut your losses. The earlier you can identify a bad relationship, the better. One customer of Lexicomp came to us after unsuccessfully trying to work with another vendor's dataset. After a short while with the other database, they knew it wasn't right, and so they were able to painlessly replace the data with Lexicomp's. In less than a month after that, their product was live.

The moral of the story is that your drug vendor relationships are crucial to your success. If they don't feel right, then stop and look for alternatives. A slight delay upfront is better than being trapped with a vendor who makes it more difficult for you to meet your customers' needs and innovate new features.
 

As EMRs and EHRs incorporate more and more functions, they are going to be giving more advice and warnings to their users. A very real concern among many developers of health informatics systems is "alert fatigue" -- the idea that too many irrelevant alerts will annoy users. And worse, that a flood of useless alerts will cause users to ignore all alerts and warnings, rendering the system's automated checks pointless.

The only way to limit alert fatigue is to be more intelligent about when alerts are shown, and to whom. The key problem is not "too many alerts" -- it's "too many irrelevant alerts". There are two strategies that can help with this.

1. Allow users to customize their own alerts

Each user of your system likely has their own login which is theirs alone. This means that savvy EHR vendors can make it possible for clinicians to customize their own alerts. When an alert is shown, they can select whether they want to see the alert again -- in effect, controlling the information they see by telling the system not to show them alerts they consider irrelevant.

2. Intelligently manage alerts by types of users and circumstances

Another strategy is for the system to do some of this work ahead of time. If an alert applies only to administration, the system would know to show the alert to the prescribing doctor or the compounding pharmacist -- but instead only to the administering nurse. Likewise, if an alert applies only to pregnant women, the system would know not to show it if the patient in question is a man. This strategy relies on knowing things about your users (e.g., what kind of cilnician they are) and the circumstances of the encounter to anticipate which alerts may be irrelevant.

The most successful EMRs will likely use a combination of both approaches. But the second strategy can help alleviate alert fatigue immediately -- your users don't have to manage their own preferences to see the benefits. However, it also relies on detailed drug interaction databases able to finely slice alerts for you. Lexicomp is one medication information vendor that is innovating in this arena, and creating complex filters for many of its alerts and warnings.

Lexicomp is increasingly the preferred choice of EHR and EMR vendors for pharmaceutical and clinical information. What benefits do they deliver for developers?

1. Meaningful Use support: Including drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction checking
2. Superior customer service: Every customer receives personal service, no matter the size
3. Advanced filtering options: A unique system of complex filters allows users to target Black Boxed Warnings to particular users and circumstances
4. Trusted content and name: Thousands of physicians, pharmacists, nurses, dentists, and other clinicians buy information direct from Lexicomp because they trust it
5. Full support for eprescribing: Customers have used Leicomp's clinical decision support to create their own e-prescribing modules for EMRs and EHRs

These are just five of the many benefits that Lexicomp customers enjoy. To find out more, request a demonstration today!

Lexicomp's drug interaction database has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Now used by hundreds of EMR, EHR, HIS and other healthcare vendors, it is the information behind medication reference and clinical decision support for tens of thousands of physicians.

What makes Lexicomp the preferred choice?

• Easier implementation when compared to other data sources
• Superior customer service for all customers, regardless of size
• Full support of Meaningful Use Stage 1 clinical decision support requirements
• New innovative features like patient education in multiple languages
• Flexible delivery, including robust APIs and web services

More and more healthcare information vendors are discovering that Lexicomp can save them development time, making the road to certification and market faster and smoother. Find out today if Lexicomp can do the same for you!

As Matt Bennardo pointed out, when EMR and EHR companies are under development and they are looking to include drug and medicine information, they must given proper consideration to the quality of the drug information, the ease of installation, and the level of customer service provided by the drug  data provider.  In order to meet the Meaningful Use standards,  the EMR and EHR developers now care more about drug and medicine information than ever before.   They now care about drug interactions,  drug-drug and drug-allergy interactions,  adverse drug events,  patient education pamphlets,  dose information,  pediatric dosing inforamation,  drug brand names and drug generic names.

Hundreds of Lexi-Data customers are now integrating Lexicomp reference and transaction drug information into their systems under development.   As Matt had said:

"Comprehensive data covers all decision support Meaningful Use requirements:

• Compatible with required standards like RxNorm
• Supports drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction checking
• All data necessary for ePrescribing and CPOE
• Additional functionality like dose range checking

Fastest and easiest integration gets you to market faster:

• Easy-to-use APIs and web services -- you choose which you want
• Superior one-on-one customer service
• Most intuitive data structure and fastest implementation

New features set you apart from the competition:

• Black Box Warning filters to alleviate clinician alert fatigue
• Patient education available in 19 languages

Click the links on this page to find out more about Lexi-Data now!"

Lexicomp is the seller of Lexi-Data, a transactional drug interaction database for EHR vendors, EMR vendors, HIS systems, ePrescribers, PMS systems, consumer websites, patient portals, and more. Hundreds of Lexi-Data customers are integrating Lexicomp's referential and clinical decision support information into their own systems and products.

Comprehensive data covers all decision support Meaningful Use requirements:

• Compatible with required standards like RxNorm
• Supports drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction checking
• All data necessary for ePrescribing and CPOE
• Additional functionality like dose range checking

Fastest and easiest integration gets you to market faster:

• Easy-to-use APIs and web services -- you choose which you want
• Superior one-on-one customer service
• Most intuitive data structure and fastest implementation

New features set you apart from the competition:

• Black Box Warning filters to alleviate clinician alert fatigue
• Patient education available in 19 languages

Click the links on this page to find out more about Lexi-Data now!

 
Alert fatigue is related to the barrage of messages provided clinical decision support systems which can overwhelm a provider and cause them to ignore messages. The alerts, while found to be helpful in some cases, can result in a type of "fatigue" whereby the provider, after receiving too many alerts, begins to ignore and/or override the alerts. Receiving too many alerts can result in slowing the provider down rendering the alert useless.

One of the key reasons that clinicians are frustrated with decision support related to drug interaction software is the potential for this alert fatigue. Clinicans do not want to be messaged regarding dosage precautions related to an interaction which has already been recognized and addressed. It is particularly important in the era of electronic prescribing to engineer systems which can present the appropriate information to the appropriate person. Systems need to recognize whether an individual has previously addressed the issue, rather than simply blindly alerting to the presence of two medications within the medicine list. A collaborative effort between drug database providers and application vendors is needed, and discussions to improve the quality of alerts, while decreasing the quantity, are moving forward. These will greatly improve satisfaction with these tools. 

Not all clinical information is structured the same!
The more detail that your medication and clinical information vendor provides about crucial alerts, the easier it is for you to implement customization for your users. If every alert looks the same (which is true of what many vendors provide!), then that means that your users will have to go through them all one by one, setting their preferences on warnings and dosage precautions by hand. Then they have to keep their settings up to date as new alerts are added. That's not user friendly design!

By contrast, Lexicomp's implementation of Black Box Warnings (also called Black Boxed Warnings) gives a great deal of flexibility to developers to allow for multi-dimensional customization. Each warning contains information about which clinician the alert is intended for, how severe the alert is, and whether the alert applies only to patients with specific conditions (e.g., pregnancy).

Win customer loyalty by automating alert customization! 
This way, you can automate much of the customization without having to ask for input from every individual user. You can simply have the system hide alerts intended for nurses from pharmacists, and vice-versa. Likewise, you can make your system intelligent enough to hide alerts related to pregnancy from male patients. This is the kind of smart implementation that users are looking for to help them aviod alert fatigue and become more efficient and effective clinicians. Talk to Lexicomp today to learn more!
 

Medication errors and adverse drug events are serious issues in healthcare.  Apprx 770,000 injuries or deaths related occur each year.  For this reason and to comply with the certification and meaningful use requirements, every EMR should look at partnering with and providing their customers top rated drug interaction, duplicate therapy, allergy and dose range checking information integrated into their EMR.  Lexicomp and Lexi-Data can offer this solution. 

This information and its quality, customizability, and delivery format can really set your EMR apart from the competition.  In 2010 the EMR market grew by almost 13.5% while competition in this area is also growing at a higher than predicted rate.  More and more physicians are now starting to look at implementation of an EMR although the rate of adoption has been slowed by the complicated maze of meaningful use.  None the less, it is critical that EMRs differentiate and help physicians understand how to navigate through this maze.   Drug Data Vendors that are able to offer what others may not can help these EMR companies win more deals.  Drug interactions that are cusomizable, dose range checking for specific populations (adult, pediatric, geriatric) duplicate therapy checking and an overall solid patient education offering are areas that can be easily implemeted from Lexi-Data.  Lexicomp's expertise and customer service can also help get you up and running fast.  The database is easy to work with, available in mutliple formats and even has a web-service set can help start up and established EMRs build the structure needed to help physicians.

For more information visit www.lexi.com/businesses/ehr-vendors/
 

For years, Multum Lexicon was the source for researchers to get drug reference and drug interaction data. But where can researchers now get medication lists, pharmaceutical monographs, drug-drug interactions, drug-allery interactions, and more?

Today, there is an enhanced and updated solution built on the foundation of Multum Lexicon. It's Lexicomp's Lexi-Data transactional database. Lexi-Data provides drug names (brand name, generic name, and common abbreviations), therapeutic categories, drug classifications, indications, and standard coding such as NDC, J-Codes, and ICD-9.  The data in Lexi-Data has been utilized by many universities and research institutions, including research on pharmaceutical policy and outcomes, aging, and more.

Multum is a registered trademark of Cerner Corp.

Since ONC and CMS permitted specialists to file for exemptions from Meaningful Use guidelines, the challenge has been providing them with cost effective EHR and EMR solutions that meet their needs but are also government certified.

EHR vendors who build systems for specialists may not previously have thought about such functionality as ePrescribing, drug-drug interaction checking, drug-allergy interaction checking, and the ability to print patient education materials. But all these things are required in certified EHR systems -- even if specialists have exemptions from reporting on them.

Lexicomp is one drug information vendor that can help EHR vendors get their products certified for Meaningful Use more quickly, especially now that they have an extensive set of web services calls that provide the most important functionality without the need for on-site database integration. EHRs for specialists like chiropractors, dentists, oncologists, dermatologists, and more now have a new way to provide more value to their users.

Many EMR and EHR developers wait too long to begin for looking for a supplier of drug data and drug interaction databases.  In some respects it seems like a simple chore.  There are only a few drug data providers.  But the sooner these developers start,  the better.   Why so?

First,  there is a big difference in data structure among the few providers.  Lexicomp happens to have a very simple and logical structure,  which does solve some headaches if you come in late into the game.  But even if you start in a timely way,  simpler and more logical is better.

Second,  how comprehensive is the data provided?   Consider the following needs:  drug-drug interaction,  drug-allergy interaction,  pediatric dosing information,  therapeutic dosing information,  brand vs generic,  Black-Box Warnings,  Patient Education Leaflets in multiple languages,  drug classifications,  and more.  There are many things to consider and work on before submitting your development to the certification process.  You obviously don't want any surprises.

In the last 24 months more and more EMR developers have selected Lexicomp as their drug information provider.  There are many reasons for that.   We encourage you to call early in the process.

Patients are becoming more involved in their own healthcare, and are increasingly making use of patient portals and consumer-facing websites to do research, follow their progress, and even answer questions they might have previously posed to their physician. At the very least, they are using these sites to be more informed during visits to their care providers so they can get more value from those encounters.

All of this creates an opportunity for innovative developers to provide accurate, reliable, easy-to-understand information to patients via the web. One source for medication and clinical information that can be easily integrated into such sites is Lexicomp.

Lexicomp is a leading provider of drug reference, clinical reference, and patient education leaflets and materials to clinicians. Over a thousand hospitals use Lexicomp's information every day during patient encounters. The information available includes medication lists, drug monographs, drug interaction information (including interactions with common food and natural products), drug allergy information, patient education documents, dose adminstration, warnings, and more.

And Lexicomp's information can be easily integrated into your site in a variety of ways. You can choose to have an installed local database, or to use web services to pull information from Lexicomp's servers as needed. Contact Lexicomp today to find out how to populate your patient portal or consumer website with the information your users are looking for.

Now that ONC and CMS allow specialists and dentists to file exceptions from Meaningful Use requirements, many classes of clinicians find themselves able to qualify for incentive money. But even though they may not use much of a certified EHR's functionality, they're still required to implement a fully functional package to qualify.

This is something of a dilemma for vendors of EHR systems for specialists and dentists. How can they provide lightweight versions of functionality that may never be used, while still giving robust coverage of important features like e-prescribing? It's a development puzzle with seemingly no easy solution.

Are web services the answer?
Not every EHR or EMR can be successful relying on web services to fulfill Meaningful Use criteria, but specialists and dentists may be able to reap the benefits. Web services are inexpensive and quick to implement, and don't require you to maintain and update a complicated database of medications and other clinical concepts. Simply request the information you need via the web service when you need it, and it can be delivered to your application.

Lexicomp is one vendor that supplies robust web services to their own database of drug and clinical information. They provide enough functionality to fulfill every Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirement related to drug screening and interaction checking. They also have web services for the delivery of patient education materials.

If you think web services may be beneficial to your development, contact Lexicomp today to learn more.