🏥 openFDA Medical Device Events Scraper

🚀 Export the official FDA medical-device safety dataset in seconds. Pull 10,000,000+ MAUDE post-market reports filtered by device, manufacturer, event type, or date range. No login, no daily quota juggling, no schema guesswork.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 22 fields per record · 🏥 10M+ device reports · 🏭 thousands of manufacturers · 🚨 every event type

The openFDA Medical Device Events Scraper exports MAUDE (Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience) post-market device adverse events and returns 22 fields per record, including report identifiers, dates of event and receipt, device generic and brand names, manufacturer details, product problems, patient outcomes, and the full event narrative. MAUDE is the foundation of U.S. medical-device post-market surveillance.

The catalog covers every device adverse-event report published by the FDA, from infusion pumps and insulin pumps to imaging systems and implants. This Actor turns the live device safety feed into a downloadable dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under five minutes. Filtering happens at source, so you skip the paging and field-name spelunking entirely.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Medtech QA and post-market surveillance teams, FDA compliance officers, recall researchers, device-safety analysts, biomedical engineers, health-tech investors, investigative journalists	Signal detection, post-market surveillance reports, competitor recall trackers, narrative-text mining, complaint-handling dashboards, investigative reporting on device safety

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📋 What the openFDA Medical Device Events Scraper does

Six filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🏥 Device generic-name filter. Restrict to one device category, e.g. INFUSION PUMP, INSULIN PUMP, CATHETER.
• 🏷️ Brand-name filter. Restrict to a device brand or trade name.
• 🏭 Manufacturer filter. Substring match on manufacturer company, e.g. MEDTRONIC, BAXTER, ABBOTT.
• 🚨 Event-type filter. Malfunction, Injury, Death, Other, or No answer provided.
• 📅 Event-date from. Lower bound on event date, format YYYYMMDD.
• 📅 Event-date to. Upper bound on event date, format YYYYMMDD.

Each record includes the report number, MDR key, event type, four dates (event, received, report, added), event location, product-problem flag and full problems list, report source, reporter country, manufacturer name and city, the full device array, patient outcomes, patient count, and the free-text event narrative.

💡 Why it matters: device safety signals hide in the narrative text. Building a parser yourself means handling decades of MAUDE submission drift, manufacturer name aliasing, and multi-patient structure. This Actor skips that work and keeps the dataset fresh on every run.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded device-safety feed.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
deviceName	string	""	Device generic name (substring).
brandName	string	""	Device brand or trade name.
manufacturerName	string	""	Manufacturer company name (substring).
eventType	string	""	Malfunction, Injury, Death, Other, or No answer provided.
dateFrom	string	""	Lower bound on event date, format YYYYMMDD.
dateTo	string	""	Upper bound on event date, format YYYYMMDD.

Example: 500 Medtronic infusion-pump injuries in 2024.

{
    "maxItems": 500,
    "deviceName": "INFUSION PUMP",
    "manufacturerName": "MEDTRONIC",
    "eventType": "Injury",
    "dateFrom": "20240101",
    "dateTo": "20241231"
}

Example: every Death event for insulin pumps over a five-year window.

{
    "maxItems": 1000,
    "deviceName": "INSULIN PUMP",
    "eventType": "Death",
    "dateFrom": "20200101",
    "dateTo": "20241231"
}

⚠️ Good to Know: MAUDE submissions are voluntary for individuals and mandatory for manufacturers and device user facilities. A report does not establish causation, only that an event was observed and submitted. Treat the dataset as a signal source, not a clinical conclusion.

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📊 Output

Each report record contains 22 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 reportNumber	string	"3007654321-2024-00012"
🆔 mdrReportKey	string	"18234567"
🚨 eventType	string	"Injury"
📅 dateOfEvent	string | null	"20240312"
📅 dateReceived	string	"20240320"
📅 dateReport	string | null	"20240315"
📅 dateAdded	string	"20240325"
📅 dateChanged	string | null	"20240326"
📍 eventLocation	string | null	"HOSPITAL"
⚠️ productProblemFlag	string	"Y"
🔧 productProblems	array	["Infusion or Flow Issue"]
📥 reportSource	array	["Manufacturer"]
🌍 reporterCountry	string	"US"
🏭 manufacturerName	string	"MEDTRONIC MINIMED"
🏙️ manufacturerCity	string	"NORTHRIDGE"
📋 typeOfReport	array	["Initial"]
🏥 devices	array	[{"generic_name": "INFUSION PUMP", "brand_name": "...", ...}]
👤 patientCount	number	1
👤 patients	array	[{"patient_age": "64", "sequence_number_outcome": ["Required Intervention"]}]
📝 eventText	string | null	"It was reported that the device alarmed and stopped..."
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-22T00:00:00.000Z"
⚠️ error	string | null	null

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🏥	Full MAUDE coverage. 10M+ post-market device adverse-event reports across decades of submissions.
🎯	Multi-dimensional filtering. Device, brand, manufacturer, event type, and date range compose freely in a single run.
📝	Full event narratives. Free-text descriptions on every record, ready for NLP and signal detection.
🏭	Manufacturer details. Name plus city for cross-reference with corporate records.
⚡	Fast. 10 reports in under 5 seconds, 10,000 in under five minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls live MAUDE data published by the FDA.
🚫	No authentication. Works with the public openFDA dataset. No token or quota required from you.

📊 Device-event surveillance is the foundation of every modern medtech quality system, complaint-handling pipeline, and post-market study.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ openFDA Medical Device Events Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	10M+ reports worldwide	Live per run	device, brand, manufacturer, event type, date	⚡ 2 min
Commercial post-market suites	$50k+/year per seat	Curated, scored	Daily	Many	⏳ Weeks
Manual MAUDE quarterly downloads	Free	Bulk only, lagging	Quarterly	Local parsing	🐢 Days
Building your own ingestion	Engineering cost	Brittle	Breaks on schema drift	Custom	🕒 Weeks

Pick this Actor when you want clean structured MAUDE records, server-side filters, and zero pipeline maintenance.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the openFDA Medical Device Events Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a device, manufacturer, event type, or date range, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

🛡️ Medtech QA and post-market surveillance Quarterly safety updates per device line Competitor recall and malfunction trackers Signal detection on injury or death clusters Narrative-text mining for emerging issues	⚖️ FDA compliance and regulatory affairs Pre-submission research on similar devices Post-market reporting evidence Periodic Safety Update inputs Inspection-ready trail of source records
🩺 Hospital biomedical engineering Device-acquisition risk reviews Internal benchmarks of device families Investigations of in-house complaints Vendor-comparison reports for procurement	📰 Health journalism and recall research Reproducible investigations into device safety Coverage of high-profile recalls Comparisons across manufacturers Public-interest reporting on long-running issues

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🔌 Automating openFDA Medical Device Events Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Daily or weekly refreshes keep downstream complaint-handling pipelines in sync automatically.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Biomedical-engineering coursework on safety analysis Replication studies on device-malfunction clusters Master's and PhD theses on post-market mining Cross-source studies linking MAUDE to literature	🎨 Personal and creative Patient-advocacy newsletters on device safety Personal trackers for an implanted device class Public visualizations of long-term trends Blog posts on recall histories
🤝 Non-profit and civic Patient-safety nonprofits monitoring device classes Civic transparency on recall cycles Investigative journalism on under-reported events Public-health agencies tracking regional clusters	🧪 Experimentation Train event-type classifiers on narratives Build LLM agents that summarize device safety profiles Prototype anomaly detection on time-series reports Validate medical-NLP pipelines against real records

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Set a device, manufacturer, event type, or date range in the input form, click Start, and the Actor queries the official FDA device-safety dataset and emits a clean structured record per report. No browser automation, no captchas, no setup.

📏 How accurate is the data?

The dataset is sourced directly from the FDA MAUDE catalog. Submission quality varies because reports come from manufacturers, user facilities, and individual reporters. Treat the records as raw signals, not adjudicated outcomes.

🔁 How often is the dataset refreshed?

The FDA refreshes the dataset on an ongoing basis. Every run of this Actor fetches the latest data, so your output reflects current records as of run time.

📅 What date range is covered?

Records reach back over two decades. Use the dateFrom and dateTo inputs to scope any window down to the day.

🚨 What does each event type mean?

Malfunction covers a device failure without confirmed patient harm. Injury covers cases where a device may have caused or contributed to a non-fatal injury. Death covers fatalities. Other and No answer provided cover residual cases.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval (daily, weekly, monthly) and keep a downstream complaint-handling dashboard in sync.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

Yes. MAUDE is published by the U.S. FDA under a permissive open-data policy. Review downstream regulatory requirements for your specific use case.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes. Open FDA records are publicly available for commercial reuse. You are responsible for any downstream regulatory or labeling obligations.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What happens if a run fails or gets interrupted?

Apify automatically retries transient errors. If a run still fails, you can inspect the log in the Runs tab, fix the input, and re-run. Partial datasets from failed runs are preserved so you never lose progress.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

openFDA Medical Device Events Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get device-safety alerts in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe device-event data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh device-event data into your complaint-handling system, or alert your team in Slack on new serious reports.

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🔗 Recommended Actors

• 💊 openFDA Drug Adverse Events Scraper - FAERS post-market drug safety reports
• 💊 openFDA Drug NDC Directory Scraper - Marketed drug products with NDC, ingredients, and labelers
• 📋 Drugs@FDA Approvals Scraper - NDA, ANDA, and BLA approval records
• 🧪 ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper - Clinical trial registrations and results
• 🩺 Florida MQA License Scraper - U.S. healthcare practitioner license records

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more healthcare and life-sciences scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available openFDA records are collected. Safety reports do not establish causation and should not be interpreted as clinical conclusions.