Purpose: Due to decades of nonstandardized approaches to the naming of chemotherapy regimens, representation in electronic health records and secondary systems is highly variable. This hampers efforts to understand patterns of chemotherapy usage at the population level. In this article, we describe a proposal for rules to standardize the nomenclature of chemotherapy regimens and illustrate applications of these rules.
Methods: Through our experience with building HemOnc.org, which has been under construction since 2011, we formulated a set of guidelines and recommendations for the standard representation of chemotherapy regimen names. We then performed a mapping between the HemOnc and National Cancer Institute Thesaurus vocabulary's regimens and evaluated conformance with the naming conventions. Finally, we assembled a database of acronyms and names for multiple myeloma regimens to illustrate the scope of the problem.
Results: For the first use case, 242 of 527 (45.1%) of the regimen names differed. The schema was able to allocate a preferred source for 217 (89.4%) of these regimens. For the second use case, we expanded 130 multiple myeloma regimens to 1,138 unique regimen names and demonstrate ways in which the schema can collapse these into disambiguated, but abbreviated, regimen names.
Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first proposal to normalize chemotherapy regimen nomenclature. If our recommendations are adopted, we expect that the uniformity of treatment exposure representation in hematology/oncology will increase, which will enable large-scale efforts such as ASCO's CancerLinQ to achieve better standardization.