RxNorm Drug Terminology Scraper 💊

Scrape the official US drug terminology (RxNorm) from the National Library of Medicine — no API key, no login, no proxy. Turn plain drug names such as aspirin, metformin or Lipitor into every normalized RxNorm concept: ingredients, brand names, clinical drugs, branded drugs, dose forms and packs — each with its RXCUI, term type (TTY), UMLS CUI and NDC product codes.

RxNorm is the standard drug vocabulary used by US electronic health records, e-prescribing systems, pharmacy software and clinical decision support. This actor makes it available as clean, flat JSON/CSV/Excel rows you can drop straight into a database.

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✨ What you get

Feature	Detail
🔑 No API key	The NIH/NLM RxNav API is free and public. Nothing to sign up for.
🧪 Two modes	Drug name lookup, or RXCUI enrichment with related concepts + NDCs
🏷 Full term-type map	SCD, SBD, IN, BN, DF, PIN, MIN, BPCK, GPCK — decoded to plain English
🔢 NDC codes	National Drug Codes per concept, with a total count
✍️ Typo tolerant	Unmatched names are automatically retried via RxNorm spelling suggestions
🌐 No proxy needed	Runs fine on datacenter IPs — cheap runs
💾 Clean schema	One dataset item per concept, all fields nullable, ready for CSV/Excel export

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💰 Pricing

Roughly $0.5 per 1,000 concepts scraped. There are no per-request API fees on top — RxNav is a free government service, so you only pay Apify compute. A single common ingredient like aspirin expands to 150+ concepts, so most runs cost cents.

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🚀 Modes

1. drugs — drug names → all concept variants

Input a list of drug names. Each name is resolved through RxNav's drugs endpoint and every matching concept is returned as its own item.

{
  "mode": "drugs",
  "drugNames": ["aspirin", "metformin", "Lipitor"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

2. rxcuis — RXCUIs → properties + related concepts + NDCs

Input RxNorm concept IDs. Each one is enriched with its properties, its related ingredients / brand names / dose forms, and its NDC product codes.

{
  "mode": "rxcuis",
  "rxcuis": ["1191", "1243833"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

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📥 Input reference

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	drugs	drugs (name lookup) or rxcuis (RXCUI enrichment)
drugNames	array	["aspirin","metformin"]	Drug names to resolve — used in drugs mode
rxcuis	array	–	RxNorm concept IDs — required in rxcuis mode
maxItems	integer	200 (max 2000)	Item cap for the run

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📤 Output example

drugs mode:

{
  "type": "concept",
  "query": "aspirin",
  "rxcui": "103863",
  "name": "aspirin 150 MG Rectal Suppository",
  "synonym": "ASA 150 MG Rectal Suppository",
  "tty": "SCD",
  "tty_description": "Clinical Drug",
  "language": "ENG",
  "umls_cui": null,
  "suppress": "N",
  "url": "https://mor.nlm.nih.gov/RxNav/search?searchBy=RXCUI&searchTerm=103863",
  "source": "rxnorm",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T12:35:31.330Z"
}

rxcuis mode adds:

{
  "rxcui": "1243833",
  "name": "24 HR metformin hydrochloride 1000 MG / sitagliptin phosphate 100 MG Extended Release Oral Tablet [Janumet]",
  "tty": "SBD",
  "tty_description": "Branded Drug",
  "ingredients": ["metformin", "sitagliptin"],
  "brand_names": ["Janumet"],
  "dose_forms": ["Extended Release Oral Tablet"],
  "ndc_count": 5,
  "ndcs": ["00006008107", "00006008114", "00006008131"]
}

Term types (TTY) explained

TTY	Meaning
IN	Ingredient
PIN	Precise Ingredient
MIN	Multiple Ingredients
BN	Brand Name
SCD	Clinical Drug (generic, with strength + dose form)
SBD	Branded Drug
DF	Dose Form
BPCK / GPCK	Branded / Generic Pack

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🎯 Use cases

• Healthcare apps — power drug autocomplete, dosage pickers and medication lists with the same vocabulary EHRs use.
• Pharmacy data — map inventory and dispensing records to NDC codes and normalized product names.
• Drug mapping — reconcile messy free-text medication strings from claims, labels or intake forms to a stable RXCUI.
• Clinical research — build ingredient-level cohorts, normalize concomitant medication data, or link RxNorm to UMLS CUIs.

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❓ FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. RxNav is a free, key-less public service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Is a proxy required? No. The API is datacenter-clean, which keeps runs cheap.

What happens if I misspell a drug name? The actor calls RxNorm's spelling-suggestion endpoint and retries with the best suggestion automatically.

Why does an ingredient have zero NDCs? NDC codes attach to marketed products (SCD/SBD level), not to abstract ingredient concepts like aspirin (IN).

How current is the data? RxNorm is updated weekly by the NLM, and this actor always reads it live.

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🔗 Related actors

• openFDA Scraper — FDA drug labels, adverse events and recalls
• DailyMed Scraper — full structured product labeling (SPL)
• ChEMBL Scraper — bioactivity and compound data
• Clinical Trials Scraper — ClinicalTrials.gov study records

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⚖️ Legal & data source

Data comes from the RxNav / RxNorm REST API operated by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NIH). RxNorm is in the public domain, but some source vocabularies within UMLS carry their own restrictions — review the NLM terms before redistribution. Only public, non-personal data is scraped. This actor is not medical advice and must not be used as the sole basis for clinical decisions.