Drug & Device Recall Monitor — openFDA, By Firm

Pharmacies, hospitals, healthcare compliance teams, and pharma competitive intelligence currently check drug and device recalls by hand, on two separate FDA lookups. Both share the exact same underlying schema (verified live), so this actor covers both from one pipeline: recalls matched against a manufacturer/firm watchlist, ranked by FDA's own Class I/II/III severity.

FDA's own classification, passed through directly

Class	FDA's own meaning
Class I	Reasonable probability of serious adverse health consequences or death — FDA's most severe
Class II	May cause temporary or reversible adverse health consequences
Class III	Not likely to cause adverse health consequences

Never re-derived — this is FDA's own designation, sorted for you.

Input

{ "firms": ["Pfizer", "Medtronic"], "daysBack": 90 }

One firm per line — a firm's full legal name can itself contain a comma ("Johnson & Johnson, Inc."), so entries are never split on commas.

Sample output

{
  "matchedFirm": "Medtronic",
  "category": "device",
  "classification": "Class I",
  "recallingFirm": "Medtronic MiniMed, Inc.",
  "productDescription": "MiniMed 640G Insulin Pump...",
  "reasonForRecall": "Loaner insulin pumps may have been cleaned with chemically incompatible products...",
  "recallInitiationDate": "20260713",
  "distributionPattern": "U.S. Nationwide"
}

Typical uses

• Pharmacy / hospital compliance — check your suppliers' recall history before restocking.
• Pharma competitive intelligence — track a competitor's recall frequency and severity pattern over time.
• Patient safety / class-action research — Class I recalls are the strongest signal worth investigating first.
• Investor risk research — recall frequency and severity is real material information for pharma/medtech holdings.

Pricing

$0.003 per recall returned.

⚠️ Read before you act

• No API key required for normal use. openFDA allows unauthenticated requests at a modest rate limit; a free key (optional input field) raises that limit if you hit it.
• Firm-name search is a real-text match, not exact-name-required (unlike some other official-database actors in this portfolio) — "Pfizer" matches "PFIZER INC" and similar variants directly.
• Recall data reflects what FDA has published, not real-time detection — recalls can take time to appear after initiation.

FAQ

• Do drug and device recalls really share the same fields? Yes — verified live against real records from both endpoints before building; one normalizer (toRecall) handles either.
• Why 90 days by default? A recent-activity default; raise daysBack (up to 5 years) for historical research.
• What if a firm has zero recalls? A real, valid "clear" answer — not every firm has open recalls in the checked window.

Related actors

• Vehicle Safety Report — the same classified-severity-plus-pattern approach, for NHTSA automotive recalls instead of drugs/devices.
• Recall Exposure Monitor — the same watchlist pattern, for CPSC consumer product recalls.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Drug & Device Recall Monitor — openFDA, By Firm declares all 18 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Drug & Device Recall Monitor include matchedFirm, category, recallNumber, status, classification and classificationSeverity.
• Drug & Device Recall Monitor needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of Drug & Device Recall Monitor's 4 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Drug & Device Recall Monitor documents category as: Category this record belongs to, as classified upstream.
• Every number published about Drug & Device Recall Monitor is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Drug & Device Recall Monitor is filed under developer tools and business so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Drug & Device Recall Monitor reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.