Pharmacology References for Coding Students

Posted on 07.22.2016

There are several pharmacy references available to students in the medical coding programs.  There is not a physical text for this module, we recommend using online references as they are updated more regularly and more reliable than a printed reference book.

The clinical pharmacology drug reference is accessible from the tool, “Launch 3M Reference” located on the left hand side of the screen.  After launching the references, you should see this:

pharmacology

Please select the Clinical Pharmacology Drug Reference.

Next please select the letter the drug begins with, try the letter “C”.

clinical

This will provide a list of all drugs beginning with the letter “C”.  Find the name of the drug and select the “view Adult Momograph”.  This will pull up the reference of the drug, including the classification, description and other information.

For example, C Tanna-12 displays the following:

carbetatrane

Most of the time coders need to know the classification of a drug for proper coding. The classification of this medication is an “antihistamine and antitussive combination”. Other information is available from this reference can be very important for referencing purposes.

Other free online drug reference websites are drugs.com, rxlist.com and nlm.nih.gov. Sometimes doing an online search using google or another search engine will display information from several references all at once for a faster research method.
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