OMOP data curation: Automatic Mapping of Drug Concepts to RxNorm

An important part of ETL to the OMOP CDM is mapping the source concepts to the standard concepts in the OMOP vocabulary. This can be as straight forward as mapping ICD-10 codes to SNOMED or as difficult as mapping a national drug vocabulary to RxNorm.

Drug mapping is challenging because, in contrast to other mappings, it has multiple components that have to be mapped. These components are ingredient, dose form and strength.

The goal of this EMIF project was to automate the drug mapping procedure for a Danish dataset of drugs. The dataset contained the drug name, the ATC code, the dose form (in Danish) and a numeric strength as well as a unit. An example is given below:

The poster below, as presented during the OHDSI symposium 2016, describes the mapping procedure and the results. We managed to map 91% of the drugs to a drug in the RxNorm vocabulary.

Click here to read the full-size PDF of the poster

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Written by

Maxim Moinat