Drug Shortage Monitor — openFDA Availability & Duration
Pricing
Pay per usage
Drug Shortage Monitor — openFDA Availability & Duration
Monitor US drug shortages from openFDA: product, firm, status, availability, dosage form and how long it has been in shortage. Keyless, one row per shortage episode.
Pricing
Pay per usage
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alaudin burki
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1
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4 hours ago
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Monitor US drug shortages from openFDA: product, firm, status, availability, dosage form and how long the shortage has lasted. Keyless, public, one row per shortage episode.
What you get
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
genericName | Clindamycin Phosphate Injection |
companyName | Pfizer Inc. |
status | Current · To Be Discontinued · Resolved |
availability | Available · Limited Availability · Unavailable · Not stated |
daysInShortage | 1,308 |
updatedAt | 2026-10-16 |
Two things this Actor refuses to do
1. Invent an availability. In a live page of 1,000 records, 29 carried no availability value at
all. Reporting those as "Available" would be a confident wrong answer about medicine, so a missing
value becomes Not stated — a distinct value, not a default.
2. Read MM/DD/YYYY by luck. openFDA publishes US-format dates. new Date("02/22/2012") parses as
February 22nd in a US locale and as an invalid date in most others, so the parse is explicit and tested
against a leap day and a rollover: 02/30 is rejected rather than silently becoming March 1st.
A shortage can happen twice
The same product, package and firm can appear more than once — a shortage that resolved and later recurred. A live page of 1,000 records contained 7 such pairs. The row id therefore includes the posting date, so the second episode is a second row. Without it, the second episode was deduplicated away and the run silently lost real records; a unit test now asserts the two stay distinct.
Use cases
- Pharmacy and hospital supply teams — a daily list of what is unavailable or limited right now.
- Healthcare compliance — evidence of shortages for substitution policies and audit trails.
- Pharma competitive intelligence — which firms have products in shortage, and for how long.
- Journalists and analysts —
daysInShortageturns a list into a story.
Limits
- openFDA is unvalidated. Its own disclaimer is carried into every run summary: do not use this data to make decisions about medical care.
- US only. This is the FDA's shortage list; other regulators publish separately.
daysInShortageis measured from the posting date, which is when the shortage was recorded, not necessarily when supply first tightened.- A resolved shortage stays in the dataset; uncheck Include resolved to see only live ones.
Verified
36 unit tests on the reader — both date traps, the missing-availability rule, the recurring-episode id, and search-expression escaping — plus 14 live checks against the real API: 1,000 records parsed, every row flat, every id unique, and a search that matches nothing returning an empty page rather than an error.
One row per shortage episode, flat, ready for a scheduled run or a spreadsheet.
