Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

This is a preview of updates coming to the Technical Bulletin's website in early December 2025. Return to current site.
Read more about the modernization release schedule in this announcement.
Comment via the yellow feedback button in the lower right hand corner of the page. Contact the NLM Help Desk with any questions or concerns.

This is archived content.

Links may have become inactive over time. Visit Archive-It   to find the original published layout.

RxTerms — a New Interface Terminology to RxNorm

Fung KW. RxTerms - a New Interface Terminology to RxNorm. NLM Tech Bull. 2008 Nov-Dec;(365):e17.

December 12, 2008 [posted]

NLM is pleased to announce that RxTerms, a new interface terminology that links to RxNorm, is now available for download and testing.

RxTerms is a research effort of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. It fills the need for a publicly available interface terminology for the input of medication information, e.g., in e-prescribing or personal health records. Until now, such systems have used terminologies that were either proprietary or built from scratch. RxTerms provides a free, user-friendly and efficient drug interface terminology that links directly to RxNorm, the U.S. national terminology standard for clinical drugs. It facilitates the inclusion of RxNorm identifiers in electronic health records. Efficiency of data entry is achieved by logical segmentation of RxNorm names. Drugs not available in the U.S. are pruned and names that are unlikely to be useful in data entry are suppressed. Additional synonyms from other sources further enhance the user-friendliness. RxTerms is currently being used in a demonstration project for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and will also be used in the NLM Personal Health Record (currently under development).

A Unified Medical Language System® license is not required to use RxTerms. We request that you give us your contact information when you download RxTerms for the first time, so that we can inform you of new developments and get your feedback. Downloading the files indicates acceptance of the Terms and Conditions of Use for RxTerms.

We welcome your feedback and suggestions. Please contact us at: kfung@mail.nih.gov