WHO Essential Medicines List — Procurement Lookup API

Full structured export of the WHO Essential Medicines List — the global standard reference for medicines considered essential for basic healthcare. Filter by therapeutic category, name, or dosage form.

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What this Actor does

Data source: WHO Electronic Essential Medicines List — the official WHO eEML site. Edition 23 (2023), 667 medicines, 1418 recommendations.

Output is one JSON record per result, conforming to the azureblue/medical-core envelope so you can join across our other actors on sourceUrl and dataHash.

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Use Cases

1. Global-health procurement planning

An NGO planning a field hospital for cardiovascular care exports the entire EML category to spec their drug formulary. Output goes straight into procurement RFQs — saves a 2-day manual research cycle per deployment.

2. Medical-school curriculum design

A pharmacy program rebuilds its essential-drugs syllabus around the latest EML. Bulk export becomes their LMS source-of-truth — no manual reformatting vs. parsing the WHO PDF.

3. Hospital formulary gap analysis

A hospital pharmacy benchmarks current stock against the EML. Diff against their stock CSV identifies essential-drug gaps the procurement committee must close.

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Input

{
  "category": "Cardiovascular",
  "maxResults": 100
}

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Output (sample item)

{
  "medicineName": "Atenolol",
  "category": "Cardiovascular > Beta-blockers",
  "dosageForm": "tablet (oral): 50 mg | 100 mg",
  "indications": "Hypertension, angina pectoris",
  "url": "https://list.essentialmeds.org/medicines/22"
}

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Pricing

Event	Price	When it fires
Per result	$0.005	Per scraped record pushed to the dataset

Trial mode: pass mode: "trial" to get 5 results free with no charges. Use it to evaluate output shape before subscribing.

Pricing on this Actor will rise on 2026-06-17 in line with our monetization tier upgrade. Subscribers active before then keep the current price.

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Compliance

• Public-data only — every endpoint is the source's official public interface. No login walls, no PHI, no paywalled content.
• GDPR Art. 6(1)(f) / equivalent — buyer is responsible for downstream use of the extracted data.
• Source attribution — every dataset item includes sourceUrl linking back to the canonical source.

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Sister Actors — complementary coverage from azureblue

• drug-interaction-checker
• ema-drug-approval-scraper
• medical-device-recall-scraper

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Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md in this Actor.