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Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®)

RxNorm Release Notes

June Release - 06/07/2010

This release of RxNorm is consistent with the 2010AA UMLS Metathesaurus release. For additional information about RxNorm releases, including scripts for loading the RxNorm data into Oracle and MySQL databases, read the RxNorm Documentation.

Sources

The following sources have been updated since the previous RxNorm release:

Source NameSABDate Updated
Gold Standard Alchemy GS 05/06/2010
Medi-Span Master Drug Data Base MDDB 05/05/2010
Multum MediSource Lexicon MMSL 05/01/2010
Micromedex DRUGDEX MMX 05/03/2010
FDA National Drug Code Directory MTHFDA 04/19/2010
FDA Structured Product Labels MTHSPL 06/01/2010
First DataBank NDDF Plus Source Vocabulary NDDF 05/07/2010
Veterans Health Administration National Drug File - Reference Terminology NDFRT 06/07/2010
Veterans Health Administration National Drug File VANDF 04/27/2010

The following sources have not been updated since the previous RxNorm release:

Source NameSABDate Updated
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) MSH 08/17/2009
SNOMED Clinical Terms (drug information) SNOMED CT 01/31/2009

Data Changes

On January 29, 2010, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration (VHA) signed an agreement making it possible for the VHA National Drug File - Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) to be included as a source vocabulary in RxNorm. NDF-RT is a terminology used to code clinical drug properties, including mechanism of action, physiologic effect, and therapeutic category. It is an extension of the VHA National Drug File (VANDF), another RxNorm source vocabulary. Beginning with the RxNorm release on Monday, June 7th, NDF-RT data will be included in the RxNorm monthly releases. It will continue to be released as a source in Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) as well.

Users should note that a minor change has been made to the MySQL and Oracle database load scripts that accompany the RxNorm data files in the release zip file. The "RXCUI not null constraint" has been removed from the RXNSAT ddl in the "RxNormDDL.sql" file for Oracle (scripts/oracle directory) and in the "Table_scripts_mysql_rxn.sql" file for MySQL (scripts/mysql directory) to accommodate "RXCUI null" cases for NDFRT relationship attributes. This change did not affect the OCD RRF files.

For more information specific to NDF-RT, please contact Michael Lincoln at the VHA (michael.lincoln@va.gov). Questions about the RxNorm representation of NDF-RT should be sent to: rxnorminfo@nlm.nih.gov.

Data Counts

Term Type or AttributeNumber
Active GPCK forms 278
Active BPCK forms 356
Active SCD forms 18,838
Active SBD forms 15,620
Active RXNORM IN atoms 4,856
Active RXNORM PIN atoms 1,523
Active RXNORM BN atoms 13,765
Active RXNORM DF atoms 100
   
Obsolete GPCK forms 37
Obsolete BPCK forms 12
Obsolete SCD forms 12,839
Obsolete SBD forms 3,928
Obsolete RXNORM IN atoms 0
Obsolete RXNORM PIN atoms 0
Obsolete RXNORM BN atoms 0
Obsolete RXNORM DF atoms 55
OCD atoms 260,593
   
Source-asserted NDC codes 553,985
Distinct Source-asserted NDC codes 340,351
SAB=RXNORM NDC codes 287,134
Distinct SAB=RXNORM NDC codes 287,134

Last Reviewed: June 7, 2010