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National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) Patient Education Module

First DataBank drug databases can be found in virtually any healthcare application requiring integrated drug data. Our NDDF Plus drug knowledge base, for example, has been a critical component in thousands of real-world installations, for access at the point of need. Its wide-spread use provides a consistent element among applications and between user departments, enabling users to communicate more efficiently.

We include brief descriptions for other established uses of our drug content.  For several decades, managed care organizations and health insurers have been using disease management programs to improve patient outcomes, reduce hospitalizations and control costs. Typically, these programs focus on patients with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. They often include daily home-monitoring of patient conditions and vital signs, nurse or case-worker follow-ups with subsequent provider alerts, and low-cost prescription-drug coverage. The overall goal is to decrease the use of acute-care services, and to offset the costs of additional disease-management screening, monitoring and patient-education services. Ultimately, disease management can help patients remain healthy and improve their quality of life.

To create disease-management interventions personalized for each patient, providers need access not only to individual electronic medical records (EMRs) and patient-supplied information, but also to comprehensive databases such as First DataBank's National Drug Data File (NDDF) Plus, and its related clinical content to support clinical decision making for medications. In addition, First DataBank's patient education monographs help patients understand their medications in easy-to-read consumer language.

Data mining is a rapidly emerging application that involves analyzing raw healthcare data to discover trends—in both patient care and practice management. In addition, data mining affects both areas when used by providers to analyze quality data for participation in pay-for-performance programs.

Widespread application of data mining depends on the availability of two critical information-technology (IT) resources: electronic medical records (EMRs) and database analysis and reporting functions for patient treatment data and medication-related data.

First DataBank's National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus), which is widely used throughout the healthcare continuum, supports both of these areas.

NDDF Plus offers flexible navigation capabilities through our Multiple Access Points (MAPs) to help facilitate data mining activities. MAPs advantages are tied closely to their adherence to "good vocabulary practice" in database language conventions. This practice is characterized by three features: first, drugs are represented by stable numeric identifiers, which point to only one medication concept; two, numbers used to represent concepts do not have any meaning built into them—they're "dumb" numbers; and three, drug identifiers are single-purposed—that is, they represent only one medication concept.