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EU Standard Terms Vocabulary

Vocabulary Users
#1

Is anyone familiar with the EU Standard Terms vocabulary? It is available here:

https://standardterms.edqm.eu/

We have discovered that Sweden is using this in their pharmacy registry to assign the dose forms (e.g. film-coated tablet, hard capsule). I got access to the whole dictionary and can search the Swedish terms to find matching concepts that have been translated into all the EU official languages. (e.g. searching for “Filmdragerad tablett” pulls up concept 10221000, named “film-coated tablet” and with many other language translations, and some related concepts).

Would a vocabulary like this ever be considered for addition to the OMOP set? We likely have some in Sweden who could help, and it may be useful in other EU countries too.

#2

@dmyers3:

That could very well be added, but what’s the use case? Do you have it in your source data? Do you want to use it instead the Dose Forms in RxNorm/RxNorm Extension?

#3

We have the Swedish version (out of the many language translations) of the EU standard in our source data. Personally, I don’t think it’s the end of the world if we map them to the RxNorm vocabulary, but I can also see an advantage of the EU vocabulary if other countries are using it.

I don’t have the whole vocabulary yet. I just got access to their website and can only look up one term at a time on there. However, I just got instructions to access a more advanced portion of the site that should allow broader extraction.

In the end, our goal is to get the Swedish Rx data into the OMOP standard RxNorm terms. Maybe the question is more about getting the mappings and hierarchy between RxNorm and EU Standard Terms correct than the EU vocabulary itself.

What is typically the best way to take a vocabulary like this and map it to the best-approved, most standard concepts in the CDM? That is where we really want to be, however we get there. We just need some kind of link since our source data is based on these concepts, which are not in OMOP directly.

#4

@dmyers3:

That’s not the point. The point is that aim to standardize the terminologies we use in the CDM ata, instead of using a generic terminology repository where everybody can use whatever they want. The result is that any query will work on any OMOP CDM database, no matter of it’s provenance. So, if we decide to adopt the EU Dose Forms we need to drop RxNorm for this purpose. This is a big surgery. If you think you have a good use case bring it on.

I just don’t think there is one. The European drug forms are no better than the American ones.

We actually have a solution for this: http://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php?id=documentation:international_drugs. Give us a day or so, we need to update a couple things, but briefly international drug vocabularies are either mapped to RxNorm, or added as RxNorm Extension. You can see the resulting structure here: http://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php?id=documentation:vocabulary:drug.

Please let us help you with that (and learn in the process). We already added the national drug markets of the UK (dm+d), France (BDPM), Germany (AMIS) and Canada (DPD), and are in the process of adding Australia. Let us know.

#5

Thank you, as always, for your reply. I apologize for my phrasing. I don’t think it came across right.

I am certainly not proposing a replacement of RxNorm with the EU standard. It’s making sure the Swedish data goes into RxNorm OK that is my goal.

The rest of the critical attributes for the mapping should be set up pretty well thanks to assistance from Martijn. It was just the dose form I wanted to confirm. I am at some conferences this week (with Martijn and Patrick coincidentally), so it will be a couple days before I get too far. I’ll look for the updates and continue working with those two, and any others in the community, at that point.

Thank you! I am trying to learn and hope to contribute with the link to Sweden, but OMOP’s structure isn’t quite intuitive for me yet. I figure it’s better to ask and sound stupid than plow ahead blindly and remove all doubt!

#6

@dmyers3:

No need to self-deprecate, man. :smile: This is a debate forum. You can make any point you want, and all I was trying to do is to find out the merits. Because if you have a good idea we would love to know.

Do you want to take a look together?

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