Hospitals and integrated delivery networks (IDNs) are under enormous pressure to reduce medical errors, improve efficiency and contain costs. Achieving these goals relies increasingly on robust clinical decision-support systems and reliable interoperability among all of these systems throughout the enterprise. And because medical treatment often centers on drug therapy, a comprehensive and up-to-date drug database is an indispensable part of making these goals a reality.

First DataBank's National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) is the most comprehensive, flexible, and up-to-date integrated drug database in the industry. Our wide use in the variety of information systems within hospitals and IDNs—and throughout this market segment in the United States and Canada—is a clear indication of the trust we've earned in our 25 years as a pioneering industry leader.

Clinician adoption of electronic healthcare—be it electronic medical records (EMR), computerized physician order entry (CPOE), pharmacy dispensing, and/or electronic medication administration records (eMAR)—depends on clinicians feeling confident that they're receiving reliable information within their typical workflow. First DataBank supports that goal in numerous ways.

For example, clinicians need powerful clinical decision support for safety-related measures, such as medication reconciliation. Our Multiple Access Points (MAPs) provide that support. A complete and flexible drug vocabulary that employs recognized best practices, MAPs™ contains built-in relationships among terms that not only facilitate medication reconciliation, but generally improve the efficiency of drug communications. In part, this occurs because the variety and flexibility of the descriptions in MAPs™ enable you to zero in on drug information within your normal workflow, whether you're a physician, pharmacist, or nurse.

Similarly, electronic systems must simplify and speed up physician ordering. Our OrderView Med Knowledge Base does just that through physician-friendly navigation that minimizes the number of steps (or clicks) to get to the proper order, while still linking to all of the appropriate product detail for pharmacy dispensing and nurse administration. And you can narrow pick lists based on patient-specific factors, such as patient age, weight, and organ function.

Other features offer additional decision support for your safety and efficiency goals. There's the way our drug databases accommodate FDA-mandated bar-code scanning. Or the way we reduce alert overload without compromising patient safety by deploying clinical modules that check for drug-drug, drug-allergy, and drug-food interactions. Or our array of dosing content options that can reduce dose-related medication errors in the workflow.

In short, by drawing on the following components, First DataBank sets the standard for providing user-centric drug information for hospitals and IDNs.

NDDF Plus is the leader in supplying comprehensive coverage of descriptive, pricing and clinical information on drugs. It encompasses medications approved by the FDA, plus commonly used over-the-counter drugs and information on herbals, nutraceuticals, dietary supplements, and medical devices.

Comprehensive and up-to-date are the key concepts here, since drug content is dynamic and notoriously complex to maintain. It's essential, therefore, that the drug database behind hospital and IDN applications be the most reliable in the industry. NDDF Plus is that database. It also offers you the most efficient ways of navigating to exactly the information you need for the task at hand, allowing for more informed decision-making, fewer medication errors and increased patient safety.

MAPs are the flexible, user-centric drug identifiers that enable all users to zero in on First DataBank drug information quickly and efficiently within their normal workflow.

Our OrderView Med Knowledge Base establishes an order-centric view to match how a physician naturally orders meds. It is designed specifically to simplify and speed up medication ordering, and is ideal for closed-loop inpatient settings. It pioneers the concept of the "orderable med": drug content that enables clinicians to use their most common drug descriptions as "stepping stones" for completing medication orders in the fewest possible steps.

OrderView also: provides common order components, including valid doses and frequencies; links orderables seamlessly to associated products on a formulary; supports dose adjustments for organ impairment; performs mg/kg calculations for final doses; handles pediatric orders; and provides translation for discharge scripts and patient instructions.

Our clinical modules for drug-drug, drug-allergy, and drug-food interactions and other clinical decision support offer exceptionally flexible ways for you to create applications that categorize and display potentially harmful interactions. First DataBank's dedicated clinical staff separates the interactions into highly granular categories, and then carefully and consistently creates subsets of the most clinically relevant drug interactions. This reduces "noise" that less relevant interactions create, and eliminates the need for clinicians to spend undue time researching alerts.

First DataBank Medical Lexicon is a specialized medical vocabulary relating drug products to various diagnoses and health-related concepts in our disease decision-support and dosing modules.

Our Tall Man Plus database helps prevent dispensing errors caused by look-alike and sound-alike drug product names. It accommodates bar-code solutions by enabling developers to link drug product Universal Product Codes with National Drug Code (NDC) identifiers.