ehr onc final certification - Department of Health Care Services

was needed before RxNorm could be adopted in full. Some commenters stated that
RxNorm is not complete and requested guidance on how gaps in RxNorm will be
addressed. A couple commenters stated a concern that current drug databases do not map
to RxNorm and that in order to develop interfaces for electronic prescribing services,
pharmacies and developers will need to expend significant effort. Other commenters
stated that more clarification was needed with respect to the description of the adopted
standard and one of those commenters recommended that the description be changed to
“a drug data source provider that demonstrates group domain comprehensiveness.”
Response. We have consolidated and addressed our adopted vocabulary standard
for medications under this certification criterion. However, our response and subsequent
clarifications are applicable to all certification criteria that reference this vocabulary
standard.
As we explained in the Interim Final Rule, we determined that the HIT industry
would benefit from a certain degree of flexibility with respect to the coding of
medications. To provide this flexibility while also establishing a glide path to full
adoption of RxNorm, we adopted a standard that permits the use of one of many different
vocabulary standards. We specified that a Complete EHR or EHR Module would be
compliant with the adopted vocabulary standard if it utilized “[a]ny code set by an
RxNorm drug data source provider that is identified by the United States National
Library of Medicine as being a complete data set integrated within RxNorm.” We
specified the standard this way in order to establish what we believe is an important
bridge to full RxNorm adoption and will help facilitate this transition over time. Our
adoption of this standard stems from our belief that Complete EHRs and EHR Modules
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