Detecting Potential Medication Selection Errors During Outpatient Pharmacy Processing of Electronic Prescriptions With the RxNorm Application Programming Interface: Retrospective Observational Cohort Study.

The NLM's RxNorm API can perform an independent and automatic double-check of correct medication selection to verify e-prescription processing at outpatient pharmacies. RxNorm has near-comprehensive coverage of prescribed medications and can be used to recover from medication selection errors. In the future, tools such as this may be able to perform automated verification of medication selection accurately enough to free pharmacists from having to perform manual double-checks of the medications selected within pharmacy dispensing software to fulfill e-prescriptions.