Semiautomatic Mapping of a National Drug Terminology to Standardised OMOP Drug Concepts

Details

The research addresses the challenge of integrating a country's unique drug vocabulary with global standards like OMOP's RxNorm Extension (RxN/E), as Austria’s national terminology lacked fine-grained mappings to these standards. The study employed a semi-automated approach using publicly available supplementary data, applying probabilistic matching and hierarchical refinement techniques. This process successfully mapped 18,390 out of 19,273 drug concepts (95.42%) from Austria's national terminology to RxN/E. Notably, 73.65% of the concepts were mapped to specific targets such as branded drug boxes and quantified clinical drugs. The findings highlight that this method yields fine-grained mappings, surpassing previous ingredient-level focus, thereby enabling precise and comprehensive drug data integration for secondary use. To promote transparency and community refinement, the results are disseminated in Usagi-formatted CSV files and HL7 FHIR ConceptMaps.