RxNorm

[Moh'd Matarneh]

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]

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]

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]

> 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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[Moh'd Matarneh]

my last question, for semantic clincal drug coding is it better to go SNOMED or RxNorm?

Thanks again,

[Sam Habiel]

That's a difficult question, and it depends on the drugs in use in your country and what data-granularity you want (Is Paracetamol Tablet good enough? How about Paracetamol 500mg? Both are vague.) I am not an expert in this area, so I cannot really provide good advice. I think the answer will become obvious to you after a few months of investigation.

--Sam

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[Sam Habiel]

I just banned slimt...@gmail.com from posting on the hardhats. I am not sure what the last message was about, but it has nothing to do with VistA and seemed to be political.

--Sam

On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 5:34 PM Ernesto Paulo Ritacca <slimt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Team I no longer have my root certificate so not sure I can link up like we have been for any support.  I think ISIS or India devs took it.  Actually, Trump's son stole it, Baron or whatever.....i dunno, that kid is trouble.  

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