First DataBank's Indications Module can be used as a tool for assessing the appropriateness of a particular course of drug therapy, given a specific medical condition. This module can help you make informed decisions regarding a choice of medications that are known to be appropriate for your patient's condition.

You can use the Indications Module to generate a list of drugs in a "look-up" mode that are commonly used to treat a given disease state. Or, given a specific drug, you can query the module for a list of indications that it is typically chosen to treat. These lists are based on matching for a particular drug the approved indications, as well as reported unlabeled uses that have been substantiated by the primary medical literature. You can choose to view all indications, or only the approved ones.

You'll find the Indications Module useful in both prospective and retrospective Drug Utilization Reviews. For retrospective applications, for example, drug use patterns can be tracked and then analyzed using the Indications Module medications database. Drug orders that reveal drug-disease contraindications can be flagged to show potentially inappropriate therapy (see also the Drug-Disease Contraindications Module). You can also generate reports indicating physician prescribing patterns or the frequency of inappropriately prescribed targeted drugs.

Using the Indications Module knowledge base, an application can predict (at three levels of certainty) that a particular drug is being used to manage a specified indication. This can be useful for prioritizing the indications for a known drug when a patient diagnosis is unavailable. The Indications Module operates in a standalone pharmacy system environment, so no direct link to a patient's medical history is required; if one is available, however, it can be used.

The Indications Module is used in conjunction with 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. Phrases referring to indication-related terms can be searched or displayed using either primary professional terminology or standard medical abbreviations. For consumer applications, layman synonyms are provided. FML allows both related-concept searches and alerts.