Intro to Drug Terminology
In the video below Joey LeGrand introduces drug terminology, starting with National Drug Codes (NDCs) which include segments to indicate manufacturer, product, and pack size for pharmaceutical formulations. He also introduces RxNorm codes which “normalize” the various NDC segments, allowing drugs to be grouped more broadly.
Intro to Drug Classification
In the video below, Joey describes a use case for RxNorm relating to the EHR, where a patient’s medication list may exist in a format not suitable for free-text searching. He also introduces how to use RxClass, a NIH/NLM-supported source of drug groupings that can be used in your work.
Understanding RxNorm (part 1)
RxNorm is a standardized nomenclature for clinical drugs produced and maintained by NLM which encompasses a drug’s ingredients, strengths, and form within each name. In the video below, Joey explains RxNorm Term Types, RxNorm Relationships, and RxNorm Attributes, all of which can be loaded into a database to work with. He also introduces RxNav, which is a tool for visualizing and navigating through RxNorm data, as well as an example of a SQL query within RxNorm.
Understanding RxNorm (part 2)
In the video below, Joey further explains how he thinks about the organization of drug information within RxNorm. This approach starts with an NDC, which typically represent a single clinical product or a pack of multiple products. Multiple NDCs can represent one clinical product with variations by manufacturer or strength, etc. Each clinical product contains either a single ingredient or multiple ingredients, and those ingredients can exist in one or more forms, most of which are salt or isomer forms. Dose forms can be represented within groups (e.g. oral solution, oral liquid). Ingredient strengths are represented by a combination of the product and the ingredient of interest. There are also designations for brand products, which can be particularly important for drug pricing and financial questions.
Intro to SageRx
In the video below, Joey introduces SageRx, which is a tool he and his organization CodeRx built to help people work with drug data more easily. Joey explains how SageRx extracts raw data from open drug data sources, loads into a single database, and further transforms the data into useful tables.
Start Working with SageRx – Basic Query
In the video below, Joey explains how to log in to the SageRx site, open the database, explore various schemas and their relevant tables. He shows how to write an example clinical products to NDC query and the resulting information about an NDC that retrieves.
Continue Working with SageRx – Table Joins
In the final video below, Joey demonstrates how to write a more complex and interesting query using staging tables to see how many different dose forms fluticasone is available in. This requires a few table joins to get from ingredients to clinical product components to dose forms. He also shows how to group by dose form to get counts for each type.