Other Uses for First DataBank Drug Databases

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.

In this section, we include brief descriptions of several currently established uses for our drug content. These are merely representative applications; many other uses are possible.

Disease Management

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

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.

Web Health Portals

The Internet has opened up virtually unlimited possibilities for information exchange in many fields, including healthcare. With Web-based portals, patients and their caregivers today are discovering a convenient, single point of access for electronic information exchange—eliminating the need for telephone calls, faxes, emails and office visits for routine tasks such as appointment scheduling, education and prescription renewal authorizations.

For patients, Web health portals can now offer easy online access to their medical records; help with administrative chores such as filling out applications and insurance claim forms; plus a variety of patient-education services, including instructions on safe medication use and information about what to expect during and after a particular treatment. For providers, Web health portals offer powerful, productivity-enhancing tools needed to regularly access patient data and various clinical information systems.

To support their clinical decision-making and drug-information needs, First DataBank provides a comprehensive drug knowledge base, the National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) supported by extensive clinical content. We offer in-depth drug-usage reference information, through our database of AHFS Drug Information® monographs, integrated directly into your information system; as well as our Patient Education Module, a comprehensive source of authoritative medication-usage content, written in easy-to-read consumer language.

System developers can also build their healthcare solutions faster, using First DataBank's Drug Information Framework, which simplifies system implementation.

Essential Building Blocks

By drawing on the following components, First DataBank sets the standard for providing context-relevant drug information for a wide variety of applications.

First DataBank's National Drug Data File Plus (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 and dietary supplements. Comprehensive and up-to-date are the key concepts here, since drug content is dynamic and notoriously difficult to maintain. It's essential, therefore, that the drug database behind any healthcare application be the most reliable in the industry. NDDF Plus is that database. NDDF Plus also offers you the most efficient ways of navigating to exactly the information you need for the task at hand—for more informed decision-making, fewer medication errors and increased patient safety.

These enhanced navigation capabilities are the result of our Multiple Access Points (MAPs)—flexible, user-centric drug identifiers that enable you to zero in on our drug database information quickly and efficiently within your normal workflow. MAPs incorporate our proprietary Enhanced Therapeutic Classification (ETC) system and First DataBank Medical Lexicon. ETC allows you to quickly find products within therapeutic classes, and to revise clinical information at as general or specific a level as necessary. FML is a specialized medical vocabulary relating drug products to various diagnoses and health-related concepts in our disease decision-support and dosing modules.

In addition to its in-depth drug information, NDDF Plus accommodates multiple user perspectives (i.e., those of clinicians, pharmacists, patients, etc.). Its clinical decision-support modules provide healthcare professionals with a broad range of drug screening information at the point of care—to prevent adverse drug events (ADE's), reduce drug-related expenses and improve the quality of patient care.

These clinical modules can be used to detect drug-drug interactions, drug-food interactions, drug-disease contraindications, duplicate therapy and drug allergy screening. They offer exceptionally flexible ways for you to create applications that categorize and display potentially harmful drug interactions. First DataBank's expert clinical staff separates these interactions into highly granular categories, and then carefully and consistently reviews each module to create subsets of the most clinically relevant drug interactions. This reduces user message "noise" that less relevant interactions may create, and eliminates the need for clinicians to spend undue time researching alerts.

First DataBank's in-depth patient-education materials—presented in our Patient Education Module—offer a comprehensive resource for patients and their families when they have questions regarding their medication use. These monographs not only encourage patient compliance, they also improve the quality of care and reduce the costs associated with drug-related morbidity.

To accelerate system implementation, First DataBank offers its Drug Information Framework, a highly flexible content-integration solution that enables healthcare software developers—and organizations developing their own solutions—to rapidly embed the content of NDDF Plus into their systems.