How to Normalize Immunizations to RxNorm… for Free!

Jul 25, 2018 | Jim Shalaby

Elimu is the Swahili word for knowledge. We chose this name because our products and services provide clinicians with the knowledge they need to care for their patients. Elimu can also mean education. In the spirit of knowledge and education, we are beginning our Knowledge Sharing program. The intent of this program is to share tools and information at no charge. Periodically, we’ll share something new. To kick off the program this month, we’re sharing our Immunization mapping tables.

Many health institutions need to report, or run analytics, on immunizations within their populations. Some of this is driven by compliance/quality, and some of it is driven by financial models or other motivators. The challenge with immunizations in particular is that they can be coded in different nomenclatures – NDC, RXNORM, and CVX. Because immunization records don’t always cleanly overlap with administration and order records, reporting and analytics is tricky because you don’t know if you’re over-counting or under-counting. Customers have asked us to solve this problem many times in the past. The way we did it was to create a CVX to RxNorm mapping table. Our customers have made good use of our CVX to RXNORM mappings over the years and we would now like to make them freely available to healthcare provider institutions for use. These mappings are derived from the CDC Immunization Information Systems NDC Crosswalk tables. We then validated and expanded upon them by adding NDC relationships to RxNorm.

If you’d like to download the Immunization mappings, they are available here. To ensure that you’re not a robot, you’ll just need to enter a valid email address, nothing else.

Please also note that for liability purposes, the provided mappings are intended only for use in reporting/analytics. They will require modification if they are to be used for Clinical Decision Support or other direct to patient caregiving activities.

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