Medication Dosing

• Our Web API solution empowers integration of all Lexicomp content. Consistent API programming calls save time and allow clinicians to launch from their internal applications into our clinical databases, utilizing whatever delivery platform they choose.

• Our Web Services platform is written for compatibility with Microsoft® .NET™ and Java™ programs. XML data can be obtained via standardized calls and is then processed and returned in real-time. Your application will retrieve and parse the content into your display, making complete customization a reality.

XML Datasets

• If live Internet calls are not preferred, XML datasets are available for download from an FTP site and incorporated directly into the database.

If you have any questions about Lexi-Data, please contact us!

Are you developing an EMR and trying to get to the market as quickly as possible?  Are you planning on going through Meaningful Use certification?  If you answered yes to either of these questions (or both!), here are a few tips to help you get started in selecting a drug database for your system.

1) Quality of Content - This is very important to consider as it is probably not the expertise of your developers.  Select a drug information vendor that has a strong reputation in the market and trusted clinical information. 

2) Flexibility - Select a vendor that offers flexibility and customization of the content.  For example, customization of drug interaction alerts in your system (your users will thank you!).  Also, consider the different delivery methods that the vendor offers of their content.

3) Simplicity of Data Structure - Select a vendor that offers simplistic data structure that you are comfortable with.  Also, consider the use of an API if it provided by the vendor.  The use of an already developed API will definitely decrease your development speed.

4) Customer Support - Ensure that you have a dedicated support team to assist you if your developers have questions.  A company that strives for excellence in customer service should not charge you for support time.

Lexicomp works with hundreds of EMR and home healthcare companies to help them embed our clinical content into their systems.  We cover all areas of the core clinical decision support functions: drug-drug, drug-allergy, drug-condition, dose range checking, and duplicate therapy screening.  We support several components of Meaningful Use as well.   Lexi-Data is mapped to RXNORM and other standard vocabularies, supports CVX/MVX coding for transmission of immunization records, and contains patient education for medications and diseases.

Please feel free to contact us and one of our representatives would be happy to talk to you about our content and support.

A posting on the FDA website says, "Most drugs prescribed for children have not been tested for children." At times, only 20 percent of drugs prescribed for children had labeled indications for such uses. Instead, pediatricians often rely on independent studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of "off-label" uses to guide their prescribing.

Drug data that relies on packaged inserts is woefully inadequate!
What this means is that clinical decision support systems (like electronic health records) that include only FDA-approved labeled uses for medications are not helping clinicians prescribe to children and patients. Though more trials are being done with children, they remain expensive and difficult, and are rarely needed to bring a drug to market. There will always be a gap.

To fill that gap, EHR systems must go beyond FDA information and partner with a drug interactions database provider that knows and corrects these shortcomings. Lexicomp is one such drug information vendor.

Over 30 years ago, pediatric drug references were one of Lexicomp's first offerings. They continue to focus on that area today, carefully combing and evaluating medical literature for effective off-label uses that should be reported alongside FDA-approved labeled uses. Lexicomp also provides pediatric-specific patient education, and even has special dosing for neonatal populations.

No other drug information resource can match Lexicomp's breadth and depth of information on pediatric prescribing!

 

Lexicomp is a recognized leader in providing patient education leaflets that are easy for patients to read and understand.  Our medication leaflets are trusted and used in over 1,600 hospitals across the country as well as the US Military Health Care System.  They are available in 19 languages in an easy question and answer format.  All leaflets are available in both an adult and a pediatric level, because there can be major differences in dosing, warnings, and possible adver drug events among these populations.  In efforts to assist EMRs and providers in improving patient care, our leaflets can be integrated into these systems and printed off for the patient at discharge.  This encourages patients to better understand their condition, treatment plan, and drug regimen.  

In order to help EMR vendors meet Meaningful Use requirements, we will be coding our disease leaflets to both ICD9/10 and SNOMED terms. Having standardized coding will make it easy to integrate these leaflets within EMRs.   We offer various delivery methods of the content.

If you have an EHR, EMR, HIS system, ePrescribing system, patient portal, or consumer website and are looking to integrate patient education, please contact us today.  

 

EHR and EMR vendors have a handful of different sources to pick from when they are integrating medication reference and interactions data into their products. Clinicians have a similar choice to make when they select a drug reference to use on the job.

By and large, the data providers that sell to EHR vendors are different from those that sell to clinicians. This results in clinicians being confronted with inconsistent information. For instance, when their EHR gives them an alert on a possible adverse reaction, they may not be able to locate the same information when they turn to a reference resource.

This is a problem. It harms the credibility of the EHR system and may make clinicians less likely to use it.

There is a solution
Fortunately, there is Lexicomp -- a data provider that offers both transactional data for EMRs, and is also an industry leader in selling reference information directly to clinicians. Thousands of pharmacists, physicians, nurses, dentists, and others are using Lexicomp's drug and clinical information, patient education, interactions, dose range checking, allergy checking and more, every single day.

Clinicians choose Lexicomp because they trust our content. When you choose Lexicomp to power the electronic prescribing or clinical decision support of your EHR system, they will trust your application as well. Contact Lexicomp today to find out how to get their industry-leading drug information into your application.

Instead of writing out prescriptions on a piece of paper, doctors will perform this function directly into their electronic medical record.  The prescription travels from their computer to the pharmacy’s computer. Electronic prescriptions are sent electronically through a private, secure, and closed network – the Surescripts network.

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. 

Anyone who has been exposed to electronic order entry has experienced the dreaded "alert fatigue".  If the goal of electronic prescribing is to improve patient safety and outcomes, alerting clinicians to potential drug interactions or other dosing precautions is necessary.  In our current information age, there is a plethora of information available regarding medication safety and potential safety issues with the use of medications.  In an attempt to help clinicians sift through all this information, the FDA has established the use of a "Black Box Warning" to call attention to the most important safety issues.  A recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine reviewed several drug information providers comparing their ability to identify black box warnings and confirmed that Lexicomp is the leader in this area.
 
In an effort to incorporate this valuable information into the clinician's busy workflow, Lexcomp has recently enhanced Lexi-Data to include Black Box Warnings.  The Black Box Warnings table allows system vendors to present critical medication safety information from these warnings within a health information system.  The data is also structured in a way that will allow the system vendors to filter which alerts are presented, allowing for instance a prescriber to see warning specific to the ordering process and a pharmacist seeing warnings more relevant to the dispensing process.

Improving patient safety requires the use of "intelligent alerting", Lexi-Data has given system vendors the ability to present critical safety information in a meaningful way. 

Companies developing new EMRs for small to medium healthcare settings often wait too long to consider what drug information provider to use for their product.   There are only a few drug information providers and it is advisable to know the pluses and minuses as early in the process as possible.    It is not just about drug-drug and drug-allergy interactions.  It is not just about drug dosing information,  drug nomenclature,  dosing precautions,  patient education leaflets,  branded and generic medication lists. 

It is also about which vendor is the easiest to work with.  Who will accomodate your needs and not their needs.  Who will help you resolve cerifying body issues?  Who is the best of the best when it comes to pediatric dosing?   Who will provide decision trees for black box warnings?  Who will provide easy to use APIs?   Who provides ongoing topnotch communication?  And who is at the cutting edge?    Those are just some of the quesitons you need to answer.

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/
 

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.

As EHRs and EMRs become more widespread and more integrated into the daily activities of clinicians, concern over alert fatigue gows. This is one of the biggest issue facing developers today. The ideal EHR or EMR will provide the right alerts for the right clinicians, but won't overwhelm them.

Lexicomp is one drug data provider that is taking steps to address this issue. They have added multi-dimensional filtering to a set of Black Box Warning alerts. These filters allow EHR vendors to filter alerts by intended clinician, severity of the warning, and special conditions related to the alert.

For instance, an alert that applies only to pregnant women at the time of medication dose administration wouldn't display for pharmacists preparing the prescription or for male patients receiving the drug. When only relevant alerts are shown to clinicians, they come to value them more. The detail that Lexicomp includes in the alerts allows for smarter targeting. EHRs and EMRs can finally set themselves apart from the competition by helping clinicians solve a problem that is extremely important to them.

It is estimated that each year some 530,000 adverse drug events take place among Medicare beneficiaries alone because of drugs negatively interacting with other drugs the patient is already taking, or insufficient information about the patient’s medical history.  The Institute of Medicine (IOM) reported last year that more than 1.5 million Americans are injured annually by drug errors in hospitals, nursing homes and doctor’s offices.  These negative drug events may require costly interventions in order to stabilize the patient, including hospitalization.  

Consumers are increasingly taking an active role in their own healthcare -- a trend which can only result in better care. A key source of information for these patients are consumer-facing websites that include clinical and medication information. But those sites must of course get their information from somewhere.

Lexicomp is one such provider of information to consumer-facing medical websites. They specialize in best-in-class pharmaceutical information -- including indications, interactions (with other drugs, natural products, and more), possible allergies, dosing for adults and children, precautions and warnings, and more. Lexicomp also offers patient education leaflets in a variety of languages.

What's more, Lexicomp supplies its information in a variety of formats, including access through convenient web services. Web services allows you to pull specific Lexicomp information into your website without the hassle of maintaining an on-site database. This solution requires less development and maintenance, and means that your users always have up-to-date information. It's a perfect solution for consumer-facing websites looking to expand their content offerings. Contact Lexicomp to learn more today.

Pediatric dosing continues to be a major concern among clinicians in almost all practice settings. In fact, those who do not regularly treat children often have the most questions about proper dosing and treatment. One area where EMR, EHR, and HIS systems can meaningfully differentiate themselves is in providing this information.

Physicians, pharmacists and nurses know that children are not simply "little adults". Besides different dosage precautions, children may require different administration or routes -- and for some cases may receive completely different medications. Different patient education leaflets are also needed when treating children.

For these reasons, it's important to partner with a drug information vendor that is well regarded in pediatrics. Lexicomp is the drug reference vendor of choice among U.S. pediatric hospitals, and has specialized in this area for decades. Most clinicians will see children as patients at some point in their work, and they know that this vulnerable population requires special care. Using Lexicomp as a drug vendor can help put their concerns to rest and add value to their EMR, EHR, or HIS system.

What agony when a clinician’s workflow is interrupted because they need to confirm clinical information such as a correct dose, REMS Information (Information about FDA approved Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies is included in Medication Guide, REMS Components and Prescribing and Access Restriction fields),  or to find and print patient education materials. 

• Our Web API solution empowers integration of all Lexicomp content. Consistent API programming calls save time and allow clinicians to launch from their internal applications into our clinical databases, utilizing whatever delivery platform they choose.

• Our Web Services platform is written for compatibility with Microsoft® .NET™ and Java™ programs. XML data can be obtained via standardized calls and is then processed and returned in real-time. Your application will retrieve and parse the content into your display, making complete customization a reality.

XML Datasets

• If live Internet calls are not preferred, XML datasets are available for download from an FTP site and incorporated directly into the database.

Having a sick child can be a challenging and stressful time for any parent.  A sick child also presents challenges for health care professionals as well as health information systems as it relates to prescribing medications.  For a number of medications, pediatric dosage calculations are based on weight.  Having a weight available in the community pharmacy setting is often challenging, however this is only the first step in being able to validate the correct dosage range.  The second piece necessary to accurately check the validity of a pediatric prescription is having the correct information in your pharmacy system. 

All too often, community pharmacy systems are not equipped with the necessary drug reference database to accurately evaluate a pediatric dose.  For over 15 years, pediatric practitioners have been using Lexicomp's Pediatric Dosage Handbook and more recently, our electronic versions to prescribe and validate pediatric dosing.  Now, this information has been transformed into a data set that can be integrated into pharmacy systems to allow your HIS to help you validate these critical doses.  For more information, visit http://www.lexi.com/businesses/ehr-vendors/. 

Back in January of this year, I wrote about the steady increase of Electronic Health Records/Electronic Medical Records with the market projected to be at $3.8 billion in 2015.  Now, according to this report, "The U.S. EMR market is expected to grow from $2,177 million in 2009 to $6,054 million in 2015."  This number is almost double!! 
So leave the drug content to us and know you have made the right decision.

Reports are circulating that spending on healthcare IT is set to grow at an annual rate of 24% over the next several years. This is phenomenal growth, and it's tempting to think that rising tides are going to raise everybody's boat. But with the proliferation of EHR vendors we've seen in the past couple of years, that conventional wisdom isn't likely to hold true. How do you make sure that you're one of the rising boats, and not one of the swamped ones?

Development talent is the scarcest resource right now
Among other things, this boom in healthcare IT means more competition for talented developers with healthcare-specific experience. And the influx of cash means that a few well-funded or well-positioned EHR vendors are going to reap early rewards -- and then will likely start poaching even more top talent from other vendors by offering bigger salaries and more benefits.

Your best move is to protect your IT resources by having them focus only on the most crucial parts of your system -- the parts that will differentiate you in the marketplace. Use a drug information provider with robust APIs, an intuitive data structure, and superior customer service to take the burden off your own development team so they can focus on more important tasks. One such vendor is Lexicomp, who has helped many customers get to market faster after less-than-positive experiences with other medication list vendors.

Another tactic is to forgo building your own eprescribing tool (which can take months to certify anyway), and instead use a standalone module like DoseSpot.

Meaningful Use still rules the day -- but look ahead to Stage 2 and beyond
With the government incentives now beginning to pay out, more and more practices and hospitals are pursuing Meaningful Use certification. To compete, your system will need to meet the Stage 1 requirements like drug-drug interaction checking, drug-allergy interaction checking, and distribution of patient education materials.

But it's not enough to simply check off the existing boxes. Every other EHR vendor is rushing to do the same. Instead, you need to provide value above and beyond the others. Again, a drug information vendor like Lexicomp can help you exceed Stage 1 requirements and put yourself where you need to be for Stage 2 and 3. They offer functionality like dosage range checking for both adults and pediatric patients, detailed patient education pamphlets in multiple languages, and links to some of the best drug and clinical reference services available.
 
Deploying extra features like these in your system can help make it more likely that you'll be a rising boat when the money starts pouring in.