drbowen wrote on Sunday, November 23, 2008:
Dr. Hugh Nelson is a physician working in China. He has made some interesting suggestions concerning the use of the prescription module for drug name look ups and interaction checking. China requires that physician uses the generic name on their prescriptions and I suspect China is not the only country that requires this. He has suggested that we change the prescription module to include the generic name, the brand name and the local name. As a separate suggestion these could be used in the same text field using a separator such as a colon of an equals sign to break the fields.
This would make interaction checking easier since many (most?) of the drug:drug interactions databases use generic names. There are many different brand names world wide and many languages that do not use the character sets that we use. As an example he uses:
Azithromycin:Zpac:阿奇霉素
Amlodipine:Norvasc:氨氯地平
or:
Azithromycin=Zpac=阿奇霉素
Amlodipine=Norvasc=氨氯地平
Would this be a reasonable suggestion?
The other possibility would be to add separate fields in the for the generic name, common brand name and the local name and concatenate the names as needed for display and printing.
Sam Bowen, MD