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Managing Medical Dictionaries

Owned by Toma Holtzer
Last updated: 01-Jul-2024 by Alex Quail
3 min read

NOTE: Medical dictionaries can be LARGE files and frequently take several minutes to upload and process. Please be sure to allow the operation to fully complete, and do not cancel the operation or leave the page during processing.

If you receive an error, please open a support ticket and include a full screenshot of the error message and provide details on the dictionary type and version.

Summary

ClinSpark supports use of WHODrug and MedDRA dictionaries for use in medical coding. These dictionaries are often licensed and must obtained by customers from providers (vendors) UMC and ICH respectively. IQVIA will not provide copies of these dictionaries to customers.

Upon licensing, you will have available from the organizations zip files containing the dictionaries. These dictionary files in their original format from the vendor are what can be uploaded for use into ClinSpark.

At this time, IQVIA does not support customers creating and uploading ‘custom’ versions of medical dictionaries. Limited support for this use case is only available based on the information contained in this article. This need is still under evaluation from the ClinSpark product team to improve support for custom dictionaries at a later time.

Loading Dictionaries

The dictionaries can be uploaded to ClinSpark by a customer user with the ‘Administration Medical Dictionary’ role action here:

WHODrug Uploads

Acceptable formats

Customers are provided by the vendor a compressed zip archive file that contains both TXT or CSV variants of the dictionaries and other supplemental assets.

ClinSpark expects the files that come from the TXT variants. It will not accept the CSV files.

Supplementary files may also be present within their own archive/zip directories. The dictionary files accepted by ClinSpark will not contain names such as additional features.

The following screenshot demonstrates this concept. The WHODrug Global txt_mar_1_2023.zip contains many archived directories; the correct ones are outlined.

The following screenshot highlights another example of dictionary files that are accepted by ClinSpark.

Expected Files for B3

For WHODrug dictionaries, the upload process expects the following files for B3:

  • BNA.txt

  • CCODE.txt

  • DD.txt

  • DDA.txt

  • DDSOURCE.txt

  • INA.txt

  • ING.txt

  • MAN.txt

  • VERSION.txt

The above files are expected to be present in the root of the zip archive uploaded to ClinSpark. This is how the files come from vendor source.

If customers chose to extract or modify dictionary files from the vendor source, prior to upload to ClinSpark, they must be repacked into a zip archive at the root. Placing files first into a folder, then compressing the folder into the zip archive, will not produce a valid zip. Error messages like this may present upon upload:

E.G. the expected file path for the ‘Version.txt’ file would be \Version.txt and not \WHODrug\Version.txt.

Files that are ignored

ClinSpark will ignore the presence of any non .txt files during upload. The upload feature expects this, and is designed to ignore the extra files. It is therefore not necessary to extract dictionary files from the licensed archive and create a new zip file, for the purpose of upload.

Exported and Printed Copies Are Uncontrolled