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There is currently a monopoly in electronic prescriptions in the US. Surescripts runs the only network that connects electronic health records to pharmacies. (over 99% of electronic prescriptions are sent using them) They dictate that you must have a contract with an approved commercial prescription drug database vendor.

I want the industry to come together and make an open source drug database so that it can become the world standard. This way a lot of legacy businesses will no longer have a reason to exist and charge exorbitant licensing fees.

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I am still having trouble understanding the specific problem you want solved, and what an additional open drug database would add that DrugBank lacks but that is required to accomplish your solution.

It seems like your frustration is mostly with the Surescripts monopoly on electronic prescribing. You say that they dictate an approved commercial vendor. This is a very different problem, and would have very different solutions, than the problem We don't have any open source drug interaction database, which is where this thread started.

The difference is quality. The existing open source solutions are frankly not good enough. Industry should come together to sponsor an open version that matches the quality of vendors which will become the canonical source of truth for the world.

What's the monetary benefit to the industry in doing that?

The open source solutions aren't good because validating and fixing this data is very time consuming (read: expensive) and carried legal liability (read: expensive). Open source tends to not be good at requiring many people to do tedious things (see: most open source documentation). Companies could pay people to do it but then you've recreated a commercial vendor except competitors who don't pay get a benefit. Companies tend to open source things which are not direct competitive advantages for others in the same industry while this would be exactly that.

The commercial databases aren't great either, the information sure scripts has doesn't match first databank for example in many cases. it's not wrong just formatted slightly different so it's hard to compare against.

Ah, thank you for clarifying. What are the issues with currently available open drug information resources compared to commercial ones? I can imagine they might have information about fewer drugs, or less up-to-date information, or not enough of some kinds of information, etc.

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