Rxnorm MCP server

RxNorm — Standardized Drug Concepts

The National Library of Medicine's standardized drug nomenclature. Every prescription, OTC drug, and ingredient in the US healthcare system has an RxCUI (a stable concept ID). RxNorm normalizes drug naming chaos: "Tylenol" and "acetaminophen" and "APAP" all resolve to the same ingredient concept. Free, no auth.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

Drug data is notoriously messy. Brand names, generic names, salt forms, dose strengths, dosage forms — same molecule, dozens of strings. RxNorm gives you canonical IDs you can use to cross-reference FDA data, drug interaction databases, EHR systems, and clinical trials.

Three core flows:

1. Resolve a name. "What's Ozempic?" → rxnorm_search({name: "ozempic"}) → concept groups by term type (SBD, BN, IN, etc.) with RxCUIs.

2. Get drug properties. "What's this RxCUI?" → rxnormgetproperties({rxcui}) → ingredient name, strength, dose form, brand status.

3. Drug interactions — not available. NLM discontinued the RxNav interaction API in January 2024 and nothing replaced it, so this pack has no rxnorminteractions tool and Pipeworx has no drug-drug interaction source. pharmasafety_report returns the FDA label's own Drug Interactions section, which documents one drug rather than checking a pair; a drug missing from that text has not been cleared.

For full drug-safety synthesis combining RxNorm + FDA + ClinicalTrials, use [compareentities({type: "drug", values})] or the pharmadrug_profile compound.

Term types (TTYs) — important to understand

RxNorm has multiple concepts per drug, each at different abstraction levels:

For cross-source linking, always prefer the IN (ingredient) RxCUI when one exists. Brand drugs in different countries have different SBDs; the IN is global. resolve_entity({type: "drug"}) picks the canonical RxCUI in priority order IN > PIN > BN > SBD > first available.

Citable URIs

pipeworx://rxnorm/concept/{rxcui}
pipeworx://rxnorm/concept/{rxcui}/interactions

RxCUIs are stable and shareable.

Update cadence

RxNorm publishes monthly updates. New drugs appear within a month of FDA approval; deprecated products are flagged but kept in the database for historical lookup. Pipeworx caches with a 24-hour TTL.

Common pitfalls

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.