What is SPL?
SPL stands for “structured product labelling”, an XML format for pharmaceutical product information in the United States. Submission of product information in SPL format is mandatory in the USA. The rationale for SPL is that it facilitates exchange of information between different health information systems, and provides support for index-based searching (based on coding of terms, in a similar way to adverse event coding e.g. MedDRA). For example, a simple text search for “liver toxicity” in a PDF or Microsoft Word document would miss “hepatotoxicity”, “hepatic impairment”, “hepatic toxicity” etc. In contrast, an index-based search (based on a coding system) would pick up all relevant references, because synonymous terms are all allocated the same code. The SPL XML format includes coding information to support this type of searching.
