RxNorm Relationships between Concepts and Atoms

RxNorm provides normalized names for clinical drugs and links its names to many of the drug vocabularies commonly used in pharmacy management and drug interaction software, including those of First Databank, Micromedex, MediSpan, Gold Standard Drug Database, and Multum. By providing links between these vocabularies, RxNorm can mediate messages between systems not using the same software and vocabulary.

RXNORM provided relationships exist between atoms and between concepts, while source-provided relationships only exist between atoms from that source.

Relationships in this dataset connect RXAtom_AUI_IDs or RXConcept_CUI_IDs. The corresponding drug names for these RXAtom_AUI_IDs and RXConcept_CUI_IDs are found in “RxNorm Drugs Names and Identifiers” dataset.

For asymmetrical relationships there is one row for each direction of the relationship.

Direction of relationship: the relationship which the SECOND concept or atom (with RXConcept2_CUI_ID and RXAtom2_AUI_ID) HAS TO the FIRST concept or atom (with RXConcept1_CUI_ID and RXAtom1_AUI_ID).

A relationship will exist between the base atom and its duplicate atoms with “includes” and “included_in” (Relationship_Attribute_RELA). This relationship will carry the Source_Abbreviation=RXNORM.

Specified (with quantity factor) and unspecified (without quantity factor) versions of extended release products are connected by the “has_quantified_form” and “quantified_form_of” reciprocal relationship attributes (Relationship_attribute_RELA)