The database is backed by a massive, hierarchically arranged, organised thesaurus of terms, which contains data from authoritative texts used in prescribing, as well as the whole of the Read Codes, and in-house data, and was produced originally as part of the European Prescribing project OPADE.

This thesaurus is the first and only work to provide comprehensive standardisation of all terms used in prescribing and our sophisticated data processing routines enable substitution of non-standard terms by acceptable standard ones.

The thesaurus has hierarchical placing and linkage of the various prescribing words and terms included, thus defining their meaning in a context-sensitive way.

It contains the whole of Read Version 2 five character codes, Read Version 1 four and five character codes, dosage regimens, drug forms, and other terms developed by SafeScript. Cross referenced links to Read Version 3 codes and dm+d codes are incorporated as comprehensive electronic maps. Ingredient structuring was originally developed using an expanded Martindale Thesaurus, and this has now been considerably enhanced by SafeScript to increase specific definition and hierarchical meaning.

Hence no manual addition of data (by e.g. typing data) occurs, and all engineering, generation, and linkage of data is undertaken electronically. Consequently assurance of validity and quality of data and structure can be guaranteed.

The thesaurus thus allows ‘machine readable’ terms to be used for prescription checking and quality assurance giving the products an extremely high degree of accuracy.

Drug-Drug Interaction messages are ‘ingredient’ based, rather than ‘product-group’ based, and provide user friendly messages. These messages are fully evaluated and updated to reflect current opinion.

Ingredients are ‘administration-route specific’ where applicable, and are hence coded to sub-Ingredient level - i.e. an ingredient administered topically will have different properties to the same ingredient administered systemically, etc.

It is hard to overvalue the value of the content of the thesaurus. It is not an exaggeration to say that it forms the basis for standardisation of drug and prescribing terminology for Europe and the Rest of the World. No other organisation has even attempted to do the massive amount of work entailed in its production.

The thesaurus may be simply translated into other languages thus allowing WSDD to be used in all countries of the world. The database is thus easily transportable to all countries by mapping to the particular drug product list for each country