Virtually Unlimited Specificity, Designed for Easy Use

In recent years, drug therapeutic classification has become increasingly complex, costly, and labor-intensive. Today, novel drug agents are being developed for specific mechanisms of action. And drugs often need to be assigned to multiple therapeutic classifications. These issues—and many others—are addressed by First DataBank's Enhanced Therapeutic Classification (ETC) system. ETC represents a major advance in drug therapeutic classification systems—one that keeps pace with the changes you face, easing formulary management and drug selection, while increasing the accuracy of drug use analyses and reporting.

A New Approach to Drug Therapeutic Classification

ETC offers information system developers and end users a new approach to therapeutic classification. It integrates easily with the NDDF Plus™ knowledge base, delivering virtually unlimited levels of content specificity. The system is not intended as a replacement for your current indications database. Rather, it extends the capabilities of First DataBank's various drug classification offerings.

To facilitate formulary management and drug selection, the ETC system allows drugs to reside in multiple therapeutic classes, with links to drug concepts at any level of the therapeutic class hierarchy. It links to Multiple Access Points (MAPs), and uses a wide variety of medication concept identifiers to support multiple use-case scenarios.

The ETC system makes use of the traditional "parent/child" relationship, making the classification system easy to navigate. Using stable "dumb-number" identifiers, it minimizes changes to the identifiers, which simplifies formulary maintenance.

Enables Easy Development of Applications

Intuitive to use, the ETC system enables easy development of applications that handle formulary maintenance, drug selection, presentation of pick lists, sales reports and competitive analyses. It benefits a wide range of users in the healthcare industry, including providers, payers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and hospitals.