Intercoder Reliability of Mapping Between Pharmaceutical Dose Forms in the German Medication Plan and EDQM Standard Terms.

: A nationally uniform medication plan has recently been part of German legislation. The specification for the German medication plan was developed in cooperation between various stakeholders of the healthcare system. Its' goal is to enhance usability and interoperability while also providing patients and physicians with the necessary information they require for a safe and high-quality therapy. Within the research and development project named Medication Plan PLUS, the specification of the medication plan was tested and reviewed for semantic interoperability in particular. In this study, the list of pharmaceutical dose forms provided in the specification was mapped to the standard terms of the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare by different coders. The level of agreement between coders was calculated using Cohen's Kappa (κ). Results show that less than half of the dose forms could be coded with EDQM standard terms. In addition to that Kappa was found to be moderate, which means rather unconvincing agreement among coders. In conclusion, there is still vast room for improvement in utilization of standardized international vocabulary and unused potential considering cross-border eHealth implementations in the future.