This study builds a Normalized Chinese Clinical Drug (NCCD) knowledge base, by applying and extending the information model of RxNorm to Chinese clinical drugs.
Chinese drugs in NCCD were collected from four major resources — China Food and Drug Administration, China Health Insurance Systems, Hospital Pharmacy Systems, and China Pharmacopoeia — for integration and normalization in NCCD. Small molecule drugs were normalized using the information model in RxNorm without much change. Chinese patent medications (i.e., Chinese herbal extracts), however, were represented using an expanded RxNorm model to incorporate the unique characteristics of these drugs. A hybrid approach combining automated natural language processing technologies and manual review by domain experts was then applied to drug attribute extraction, normalization and further generation of drug names at different specification levels.
The current version of NCCD contains 16,976 chemical drugs and 2,663 Chinese patent medicines, resulting in 19,639 clinical drugs, 250,267 unique concepts and 2,602,760 relations. By manual review of 1,700 chemical drugs and 250 Chinese patent drugs randomly selected from NCCD (about 10%), we showed that the hybrid approach could achieve an accuracy of 98.60% for drug name extraction and normalization. Using a collection of 500 chemical drugs and 500 Chinese patent drugs from other resources, we showed that NCCD achieved coverages of 97.0% and 90.0% for chemical drugs and Chinese patent drugs respectively. Evaluation results demonstrated its potential to improve interoperability across various electronic drug systems in China.
Reference: Li Wang, Yaoyun Zhang, Min Jiang, Jiancheng Dong, Yun Liu, Cui Tao2, Guoqian Jiang, Yi Zhou, Hua Xu. Toward a normalized clinical drug knowledge base in China – applying the RxNorm model to Chinese clinical drugs. JAMIA (under review)
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.