RxNorm is a clinical drug nomenclature produced by NLM, in consultation with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the Health Level 7 (HL7) standards development organization. RxNorm provides standard names for clinical drugs (active ingredient + strength + dose form) and for dose forms as administered. It provides links from clinical drugs to their active ingredients, drug components (active ingredient + strength), and some related brand names. To the extent available from the Food and Drug Adminstration, NDCs (National Drug Codes) for specific drug products that deliver the clinical drug are stored as attributes of the clinical drug in RxNorm.

RxNorm is released only in the UMLS Metathesaurus. Within the UMLS Metathesaurus, NLM has mapped to RxNorm terminology from the VAs National Drug File (VANDF) and from major commercial drug information resources, i.e., First DataBank, Medispan, Micromedex, and Multum. MetamorphoSys, a UMLS software tool, includes an option that allows easy extraction of RxNorm and connected concepts from the Metathesaurus.

RxNorm is one of a suite of designated standards for use in U.S. Federal Government systems for the electronic exchange of clinical health information.

Additional information about RxNorm is available:

Developed in 2004, RxNav is a Java-based standalone application (client) that connects to the RxNorm server at NLM. It allows users to query the RxNorm database by any of its components (ingredient, clinical drug, brand name, etc) and displays all the information related to a given component on a single page.

An overview of RxNav was presented at MedInfo 2004:

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