NCPDP Terminology

The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) creates and promotes the transfer of data related to medications, supplies, and services within the healthcare system through the development of standards and industry guidance. The terminology files support two of those standards:

1. The NCPDP SCRIPT Standard supports messages regarding new prescriptions, prescription changes, refill requests, prescription fill status notification, prescription cancellation, medication history, and transactions for long term care environments.
2. The NCPDP Telecommunication Standard supports the electronic communication of claims and other transactions between pharmacy providers, insurance carriers, third party administrators, and other responsible parties.

Starting with SCRIPT version 10.5 and Telecommunication Standard version D.3, NCPDP adopted terminology sets from NCI Thesaurus, aligning with FDA Structured Product Labeling and the Federal Medications Terminologies standards.

You can download NCPDP terminology files from the NCI File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site.