DIN

The Drug Identification Number (DIN) is an eight-digit number assigned by Health Canada to every drug product approved for sale in Canada. It encodes the manufacturer, product name, active ingredient, strength, and dosage form. Two products with the same active ingredient but a different manufacturer or strength carry different DINs.

Why DIN selection is the hard part of prescription entry:

A prescription names a drug, but dispensing requires the exact product: the right manufacturer, strength, and form that the pharmacy stocks. Picking the wrong DIN means the wrong product. OCR-only tools that match a drug name to a DIN by text similarity break on brand-versus-generic choices, multi-strength products, and recently approved generics that are not in a static list.

How AutoRx selects the right DIN:

AutoRx grounds DIN selection in real context rather than guessing from fax text. For each prescription it reads:

• the patient profile and recent drug history in Kroll,
• your local Kroll drug catalog, which reflects what you stock and your preferred manufacturers,
• the Health Canada Drug Product Database (DPD) as a real-time fallback when a product is not in your catalog.

For compounded preparations that have no retail DIN, AutoRx matches against your Kroll mix catalog instead. Anything it cannot resolve with confidence routes to your team with the closest candidates shown, so a pharmacist makes the final call.

This context-first approach is why first-attempt DIN match rates exceed 95%.