German drug data was Re: [Gnumed-devel] FreeDiams news

[Jim Busser]

On 2010-07-29, at 8:26 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 05:00:28PM +0200, Eric MAEKER wrote:
> 
>>> I wish we had a German drug data source available.
>> 
>> Just give a free source to process...
>> Jim is full of energy ;) (Me too)
> 
> There is none, that is the problem.

Problems beg solutions :-)

Three activist approaches, none mutually exclusive:

1. de.wikipedia.org ... although I do not (as I write this) have internet 
connectivity, I know in en.wikipedia exists many drug topics with one page per 
drug and in a right-side characteristics box is often the information

        ATC ... code

... possibly there exists a wikipedia-coded (thematic) link, or means, or 
method of finding all such german pages and extracting

        pseudoINN ATC

... I say pseudoINN because the WHO did not so far develop a German-language 
set of INNs


2. "friend" (or find out through medical colleague contacts) a pharmacist who
- manages (and preferably owns) a pharmacy
- believes in freedom of information
- can make an independent decision

... it seems to me that any software used in his or her pharmacy must be able 
to generate reports of what they have been selling / prescribing and I suspect 
that even if the reference tables are not "owned" and are only licensed from 
data providers, the actual business data of

        drug name       drug form       drug strength

sold / dispensed by the pharmacy must surely be owned by the pharmacy and even 
just such a report (written to disk instead of to printer) would be a help. If 
both the "brand" and the "non-proprietary" name were included that would be a 
bonus.


3. build it from the GNUmed (or larger) software-using doctor community within 
Germany... no matter what software they use, if it stores within it any 
structured data like what I describe above for pharmacies, then *somebody* may 
either already have such a reporting ability within their software, or could 
ask their supporter (yes, even a closed source provider of decent service) to 
generate a file for them on a one-time basis. Obviously, the larger and 
more-varied the praxes, the more complete would be the pooled data set.


NOTE: I already generated a "Google German" translation of the FreeDiams drug 
interaction strings but do not believe it should be added to production FD 
until someone has checked it because the Google French-->English sometimes 
generated

        Association recommended

instead of "Association not recommended". However, the incentive for someone to 
go to this trouble may be better after a table (or linked tables) of German

        commercial name
        commercial entity ATC (if available)
        form
        route
        composition(s) --> linked / normalized
        strength per component

was developed.