It is well known by medical professionals that the same dose of a particular drug given to two different patients may help one, but harm the other. Thus an important constraint on drug therapy is the specific disease being treated, and previously reported adverse effects associated with certain drugs.

First DataBank's Drug-Disease Contraindications Module is a valuable decision-support aid when you're planning a patient's drug therapy. It's used as a screening mechanism to cross-check your patient's medical history against those drugs that would be logical candidates for treating that condition.

Drug-disease contraindications can be used to evaluate a variety of factors that relate to your patient's health status, including specific health-related conditions and diseases, as well as past medical procedures and diagnostic tests. Information concerning potentially hazardous prescribing practices can be incorporated into Drug Utilization Reviews, both prospective and retrospective.

In the drug-disease contraindications knowledge base, individual drug entities are assigned a code, which is linked to a list of contraindications, represented by Disease Identifiers (DxID's). These codes are also linked to First DataBank drug identifiers. In the case of multi-ingredient drug products, each ingredient may have its own list of associated contraindicated DxID's. A grouping of drug ingredients may also have its own contraindication code. These Disease Identifiers are also linked to ICD-9-CM codes, a system used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

When your healthcare information system detects a drug-disease contraindication, it generates one of three messages indicating severity levels: absolute contraindication, relative contraindication and contraindication warning. For the two less-severe messages, you can then decide whether they are clinically significant in this case, or whether the condition can be managed before the medication is given.

The Drug-Disease Contraindications Module uses the First DataBank Medical Lexicon (FML)—a controlled, concept-based medical vocabulary. FML uniquely represents not only indications, but also disease conditions, and health-related conditions, such as diagnoses, symptoms and side effects. Disease contraindication phrases can be searched or displayed using either primary professional terminology or medical abbreviations. For consumer applications, layman terminology is provided. FML allows related specific concept searches and alerts.