Integrating Drug Terminologies with Hospital Management Information Systems

Hospital Information Management Systems (HMIS) have played a crucial role in transformation and digitization of healthcare services in developing nations. One of the key components of a HMIS is the terminology adopted for standardizing entry and referencing of drugs so as to enable the system to generate alerts for drug interactions and contraindications. Generic drugs are prescribed by clinicians, indented at nursing or billing desks, and issued by the stores based on the stock availability. Conventionally, the list of drugs available at pharmacy stores integrated with such systems were derived from a notified Essential Drug List (EDL) maintained at the stock inventories at medical facilities. However, the drug terminology is not uniform across hospitals, which is an impediment for enabling drug-based alerts in such systems. This is primarily because of lack of adequate data in the local drug repository that would enable generation of such alerts. In this paper, we present the challenges faced and methodology adopted in integrating a standardized drug terminology set with a legacy HMIS, which enables clinicians to view drug interactions and allergies at multiple interfaces, and is expected to reduce clinical errors in prescribing drugs. The additional benefit obtained by implementation of the drug terminology is that the data entry is standardized, uniform and interoperable, making it useful for future data analytics on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and building decision support systems.