ICBO 2014 Proceedings


      RxClass – Navigating between Drug Classes and
                     RxNorm Drugs

                                        Olivier Bodenreider, Lee Peters, Thang Nguyen
                                       Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications
                                        National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
                                                    Bethesda, Maryland, USA
                                         {obodenreider | lpeters | nguyentd4}@mail.nih.gov

    Abstract— Objectives: To demonstrate RxClass, a web
interactive browser to explore the relationships between                                      III. RXCLASS INTERFACE
RxNorm drugs and drug classes from several sources including             Like RxNav, RxClass is supported by functions from an
ATC, MeSH and NDF-RT. RxClass is publicly available at:                  application programming interface (API), which can be used
http://mor.nlm.nih.gov/RxClass/
                                                                         independently for integrating drug class information in
                                                                         programs. The API serves the latest information available
                      I. MOTIVATION                                      from the drug information sources.
Drug classes constitute important information about the                  RxClass provides a graphical interface to explore the
drugs and are critical to important use cases, such as clinical          hierarchical class structures of each source and examine the
decision support (e.g., for allergy checking). RxNav, our                corresponding RxNorm drug members for each class. Some
RxNorm browser, already displays the classes for RxNorm                  features of RxClass:
drugs, but its drug-centric perspective does not                         • The user can navigate through the drug classes via the
accommodate the exploration of drug classes. This is the                      hierarchical menu, or use the search feature to identify a
reason why we developed a web-based companion browser,                        drug class or RxNorm drug (Figure 1).
RxClass, which supports navigation between RxNorm drugs                  • RxClass supports the exploration of all classes for a
and drug classes from several sources, including ATC,                         given drug across multiple classifications (Figure 2).
MeSH, NDF-RT and Structured Product Labels from the                      • RxClass contains an autocomplete function which will
Food and Drug Administration (FDA).                                           help identify class or drug names in search mode, as
                                                                              well as spelling suggestions for misspelled drug and
II. SOURCES OF CLASS TYPES AND DRUG-CLASS RELATIONS
                                                                              class names during search.
The Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical drug classification
(ATC) is a resource developed for pharmacoepidemiology
purposes by the World Health Organization Collaborating                            TABLE I.         CLASS TYPE MAPPING BY DRUG SOURCES
Centre for Drug Statistics Methodology.                                                                Source of Drug-Class Relations
                                                                              Class Type
The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), developed by the                                         ATC     MeSH    DailyMed    FDASPL        NDF-RT
National Library of Medicine (NLM), provides a rich                           ATC             X
description of pharmacological actions for the purpose of
indexing and retrieval of biomedical articles.                                MeSH                     X

The National Drug File-Reference Terminology (NDF-RT),                        Chem                                X          X            X
developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, provides                     Disease                                                     X
clinical information about drugs and contains FDA
                                                                              EPC                                 X          X            X
Established Pharmacologic Classification (EPC), Disease
classification, Chemical Structure and Classification                         MOA                                 X          X            X
(Chem), Mechanism of Action (MOA), Physiologic Effects
                                                                              PE                                  X          X            X
(PE) and Pharmacokinetics (PK) class types.
                                                                              PK                                                          X
ATC and MeSH provide both the vocabulary for drug
classes and the drug-class membership relations. In contrast,
as shown in Table 1, several sources (DailyMed, FDASPL
and NDF-RT) provide drug-class membership relations in                                              ACKNOWLEDGMENT
reference to the NDF-RT vocabulary for classes. All drugs                   This work was supported by the Intramural Research
are normalized to RxNorm.                                                Program of the NIH, National Library of Medicine.




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Fig. 1. Drugs from the ATC class Beta blocking agents, selective, with the ATC hierarchy of classes on the left navigation pane and the list of RxNorm drug
members on the right




Fig. 2. Membership of the drug Acebutolol to drug classes from various sources.




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