This document contains general guidelines for using the Medication and MedicationFill types. It does not cover all the information that is stored in the type – see the Medication and MedicationFill member documentation for more information.

The Medication type stores information about medication that the user is current taking or has taken in the past.  The information may be self-reported from the user , or it may enter the record from a clinical or pharmacy system.  Additionally, a pharmacy system may choose to write a MedicationFill instance to store fill information as well.

The name describes the medication that the user is taking. The text portion should always be a user-understandable name for the medication. For prescription drugs, this is normally the trade or generic name for the drug. For self-reported records, it could also be the name of a class of drugs (such as “multivitamin”, “heart medicine”) or a herbal or other medicine (“echinacea”).  If a specific coding for the drug may be encoded in the code section using an appropriate vocabulary (NDC and RxNorm are common coding choices).   The name is the only required information for the Medication type.

Dose, strength, frequency, and route are used together to specify the exact way the user takes the medication.

Medications for which there are prescriptions should encode that additional information into the prescription element.

Any MedicationFill instances that are created should add the key of the relevent Medication to their RelatedItems collection.