RxNorm

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Moh'd Matarneh

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Jan 7, 2026, 7:35:51 AM (3 days ago) Jan 7
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Greetings everyone,

I trust you all had a pleasant holiday season.

Our team is currently engaged in the process of mapping our internal drug formulary to RxNorm, utilizing the BioPortal website for data acquisition.

We would greatly appreciate any guidance or insights derived from your experiences.

Sincerely,,

Sam Habiel

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Jan 7, 2026, 10:31:03 AM (3 days ago) Jan 7
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Something I know a little about!

FYI: I attended a couple of RxNorm conferences, spoke to the people doing the work, and imported RxNorm into VistA.

You have a long road ahead. I would start by making sure that your company can fund this work into the future. If you have funding to do it once and then stop, it won't work well long term.

Here a few things to help you:

1. You will need to map 3 entities in VistA to RxNorm: Ingredients, drug forms, and drug products.
2. RxNorm contains only US drugs. However, the OHDSI collaborative maintains an RxNorm Extension that covers drugs from around the world. I am pretty certain that that would cover most of your need.
3. There are a lot of papers and hints online on mapping RxNorm to WHO ATC if that is of interest.
4. You will have to decide whether you want to do mapping tables into VistA or will you do runtime look-ups into a separate RxNorm database. That depends on your use case.

--Sam



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Moh'd Matarneh

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Jan 9, 2026, 4:50:15 AM (yesterday) Jan 9
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Thanks, Sam, for the helpful reply!
There's an upcoming national project on interoperability between public and private healthcare entities, so I think the funds will be available.
I wanted to ask about the OHDSI RxNorm extension: are the codes they create approved by NLM? And regarding mapping RxNorm with WHO ATC, could you provide me with a link to one of the papers?

Thanks in advance!

Sam Habiel

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Jan 9, 2026, 9:36:37 AM (24 hours ago) Jan 9
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> I wanted to ask about the OHDSI RxNorm extension: are the codes they create approved by NLM? And regarding mapping RxNorm with WHO ATC, could you provide me with a link to one of the papers?

1. By definition, all codes in NLM are US-only. So your question does not make sense. The OHDSI group just extended RxNorm to contain drugs from more countries around the world.
2. The US RxNorm now has an ATC mapping. I don't know about the OHDSI version.

--Sam

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