RxNorm February 2018 Release Available

RxNorm February 2018 Release Available. NLM Tech Bull. 2018 Jan-Feb;(420):b7.

The February full monthly release of RxNorm is available as of Monday, February 5, 2018 and contains the last expected version of the Veterans Health Administration's (VHA) National Drug File-Reference Terminology (NDF-RT). The new Medication Reference Terminology (MED-RT) will be the evolutionary successor to the VHA's NDF-RT. Both are formal ontological representations of medication terminology, pharmacologic classifications, and asserted authoritative relationships between them.

The VHA plans to cease publication of NDF-RT and begin releasing MED-RT in its place in the first quarter of 2018, with the anticipated first release of MED-RT to be on March 5, 2018. The last release of NDF-RT is planned to be February 2018 which will be in the February RxNorm release and will remain in the RxNorm full monthly releases for at least six months. There are no plans to include MED-RT in RxNorm; however, MED-RT will be included in the UMLS Metathesaurus along with RxNorm and its source vocabularies.

In preparation for the planned upcoming release of MED-RT on March 5, 2018, three MED-RT Webinars or training videos have been created by J P Systems, Inc. They are available now online (YouTube).