A dataset for mapping the Japanese drugs to RxNorm standard concepts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dataset that maps Japanese drugs to the RxNorm standard, enabling international research using Japanese real-world healthcare data.

Contribution

The paper provides a validated dataset for mapping Japanese pharmaceutical terms to RxNorm using a large language model and expert validation.

Findings

A large language model accurately identified RxNorm mapping candidates for Japanese drugs.

Pharmacists and researchers validated the mappings, resulting in an ingredient-based alignment.

The dataset supports NLP and ML development for terminology mapping in healthcare.

Abstract

Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) is an international research community dedicated to large-scale observational studies using real-world healthcare data. Participation in OHDSI requires mapping local terminology systems to the OHDSI Standard Vocabulary (OSV) and transforming healthcare data into the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (OMOP CDM), a standardized database schema. Adherence to the OSV and CDM enables the integration of datasets from different countries and regions, facilitating international cross-sectional analyses and supporting the discovery of large-scale evidence and new medical knowledge.

Despite the globally recognized healthcare technology and systems excellence in Japan, Japanese real-world data (RWD) remain underutilized in international research. This is primarily due to reliance on domestically managed controlled terminologies in Japan that are not aligned with international controlled terminologies such as SNOMED CT, making mapping Japanese RWD to the CDM challenging. In addition, the wide variety of pharmaceutical products in Japan has hindered the establishment of mappings to RxNorm, the standardized drug terminology used in OHDSI.

Previously, we used a Large Language Model (LLM) to map Japanese pharmaceutical data to RxNorm. A sampling-based evaluation confirmed that the LLM could accurately identify mapping candidates. Pharmacists and a medical informatics researcher validated these mappings, resulting in an ingredient-based mapping of Japanese pharmaceutical terms to RxNorm.

Researchers interested in pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacoeconomics, and drug-related clinical decision support systems integrated with Japanese RWD can benefit significantly from this dataset. It also contains information about the target drugs, their translated names, LLM-generated suggestions, and reference data, making it suitable for developing and validating natural language processing and machine learning techniques for terminology mapping.