Introduction
Canada Health Infoway (Infoway) and Health Canada have partnered in the development of the Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set Editorial Guidelines and content. The Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set provides a consistent approach to the identification and naming of medications and a limited number of medical devices and is freely available for use in digital health solutions and design applications.
For the Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set to achieve this, the following objectives were set for these Editorial Guidelines:
- To provide a basic model to support identification of manufactured products and therapeutically equivalent (i.e., generic) medications and devices
- To provide standardized naming conventions and terminology used to describe medications and devices
Purpose of this Document
The Editorial Guidelines for the Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set have been designed and developed to reflect current clinical practice and safety advice. This document provides the detailed Editorial Guidelines that are used to build and maintain the drug terminology content going forward. It is expected this document will be a living document and evolve based on user requirements and feedback. Changes to these Editorial Guidelines will be referenced in Release Notes that accompany each release of this document.
Intended Audience
This document is intended to provide health sector managers, terminology analysts, knowledge base vendors and software vendors with a practical understanding of the editorial rules applied in the creation of the Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set.
The document is designed for use by those who wish to understand the process and rules necessary for the creation and maintenance of Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set concepts and descriptions, both from a technical and practical point of view. It may also be of interest to end users who wish to see the principles of how medicinal product concepts are authored.
Background
Challenges with safe and reliable information exchange among different healthcare providers and the systems that they use, such as primary care electronic medical records systems (EMR) and pharmacy information systems, is in part due to the use of different terminologies and local identifiers (codes). As part of the evolution of digital health, it is essential that Canadian clinical systems utilise a freely accessible standard terminology to uniquely identify and describe medications and devices available in Canada.
Infoway and Health Canada are addressing the problem by focusing on the electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) use case, to fill the current gaps and develop a drug and device terminology to meet prescribing needs. These needs include the ability to prescribe a medicinal product without specifying a brand name, and to support interoperability between prescribers and pharmacy systems.