Rxnorm Files for Vista/RPMS

Welcome to the homepage for the Rxnorm Vista/RPMS Support. I am Sam Habiel, and I am the developer for these packages. I can be reached at sam dot habiel at gmail dot com.

What is Rxnorm?

Rxnorm is a standardized vocabulary set for Drugs in the United States. The goal of Rxnorm is drug nomenclature standardization and systems interoperability. More information on Rxnorm can be found at ​http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/rxnorm/.

How can I install Rxnorm on VISTA?

v0.01 (deprecated): Download and untar/ungzip this file: source:ccr/trunk/rxnorm/C0CRXN0_1.k.tgz@1206​. This gives you a kids file (.k) which you can then install in VISTA or RPMS. Right now, Installation takes about 45 minutes, though I hope to cut this down in future releases. An install transcript can be found on this page: RxNormInstallTranscript. The data corresponds to Rxnorm October 2009.

v0.02: This version changes how you would do installation. You now install the dictionary file (which you need to only install once unless it changes) and then install the data file, which changes month to month. The data installation now takes only 3 minutes on my poor laptop since it is transported as globals.
This version is for July 2011 Data.
Installation Order (doesn't really matter though!):

• DD and loading routine C0CRXNRD (if you want to update Rxnorm yourself from the NLM): source:ccr/trunk/rxnorm/C0CRXN_DEF_0002.kids
• Data (untar first and load into VISTA/RPMS): source:ccr/trunk/rxnorm/C0CRXN_DATA_072011_0100.gkids.tgz

Typical Transcript for Installation: InstallTranscriptRxNorm

NB: The releases on this server only incorporate terms with Restriction Levels 0, 1, and 4. First Databank Codes are not included because they are Restriction Level 3. Restriction levels legalese can be found in the RXNORM SOURCES Description for SRL field (fyi: SRL = Source Restriction Level); and actual restriction level can be found in the same file for each record.

Contents of the KIDS file

• RXNORM CONCEPTS (176.001) corresponding to free content in RXNCONSO.RRF
• RXNORM NDC TO RXCUI (176.002) corresponding to the NDC/RXNORM subset of RXNSAT.RRF
• RXNORM SOURCES (176.003) corresponding to RXNSAB.RRF

What can I do with Rxnorm

I haven't published APIs yet (I am working on these right now), but I have done the following:

• Resolve a VISTA drug to an Rxnorm Semantic Clinical Drug code.
• Resolve an NDC to an Rxnorm Semantic Clinical Drug code.
• Resolve an NDC to a VISTA VA Product.
• Get brand names for a specific generic.

To see examples of what you can do, look at this file, on the astronaut repo: ​http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~sam-habiel/astronaut-vista-server/enhancements/view/head:/JJIHNDC.m This adds a drug to the drug file based on info derived from Rxnorm