Code ATC

The ATC code from WHO does not aim at describing products, but classes of products with similar characteristics. As an example, ATC code J07BX03 represents any vaccine against Covid19.

By construction, the ATC does not aim at exhaustiveness. With 84 codes in the J07 branch representing vaccines, it achieves an exhaustiveness level of 7%.

79 ATC codes represent 689 concrete vaccines, giving an unambiguousness index of 11%. The difference with the total number of concrete vaccines in NUVA (742) lays in real life vaccines with combinations of valences that were never represented in ATC, such as Diphtheria and Tetanus only, or some vaccine trails that are even less precise than ATC codes. Reversely, some ATC codes were created for vaccines that never reached production.

The structure of the ATC code is meaningful: J07 corresponds to vaccines, the fourth letter (A, B, C or X) to the type of infectious agent, and the fifth one to a target disease (with some tweaks to try to accommodate for the multivalent vaccines). It is a coarse interpretability level evaluated at 50%

The ATC labels are generic, written only in English, and will never match the written form in the paper records. The paper inclusiveness index is 0%.

Because of the notoriety of the ATC codification, almost every code system included a correspondence between its codes and the corresponding ATC code. We can assess a digital inclusiveness index of 100%.

ATC code is the coarsest level of codification of vaccines, it cannot be converted back unambiguously to any other code system. The mappability index is 0%.