Drug-allergy screening is critical, since drug-allergy reactions can result in serious—even life-threatening—consequences. They are known to comprise about 25% of all adverse drug reactions. That's why they have to be considered carefully when you're prescribing drug therapy.

The easy-to-use Drug-Allergy Module quickly identifies drugs known to cause clinically significant allergic reactions. This information helps patients avoid the risk of drug-therapy hypersensitivity reactions.

Drug-allergy screening also alerts you to cross-sensitivities among related drugs that patients are allergic to, preventing reactions to drugs with similar compounds. And it documents drug intolerances, such as those causing patient complaints of nausea when taking codeine. These distinctions can help you distinguish a true allergy from minor adverse effects, guiding your risk-to-benefit assessments when deciding whether to prescribe a drug for a particular patient.

In use, drug-allergy screening presents you with a pre-defined pick list—a set of drug concepts that makes patient allergy profiling faster and more convenient. Pick lists are created by assembling sets of major drug brand names, allergen groups and individual ingredients. They're designed for "filter-as-you-type" applications, rather than "drop-down-list" usage. And they're maintained by First DataBank, eliminating the need for healthcare installations—your customers—to create and maintain their own lists of allergens for profiling.

Drug-allergy screening further enables screening for inactive medication ingredients—such as latex, peanuts and dyes—that can cause hypersensitivity reactions. Information on inactive ingredients is constantly gathered by First DataBank clinical experts for individual products at the National Drug Code (NDC) level, based on package inserts and labeling.

System developers will find many design features in this module that can speed up product development cycles. For example, it stores allergy data over the lifetime of a patient, across a whole range of healthcare settings. This results from use of "good vocabulary practices" to represent allergy concepts with stable identifiers and random ("dumb") numbers.

By using this well-defined methodology for retiring and replacing drug and allergy concepts, change management becomes much simpler. In addition, the Drug Allergy Module defines true allergy groups; it doesn't use therapeutic classes or other existing categories that have been repurposed to cover allergies.