Drug Shortage & Discontinuation Monitor (FDA)

Tracks US drug shortages from the FDA's own database and tells you what changed since the last run — including the event that matters most to a buyer: a product being discontinued for good rather than merely out of stock.

Built on the FDA's public API. No key, no login, no scraping.

What you get

One row per FDA shortage record:

Field	What it is
genericName / brandNames / substanceName	The drug, as FDA names it plus the brand names it ships under
company / contact	Who reported the shortage, and the phone number FDA publishes for them
status	Current, To Be Discontinued, Resolved
isDiscontinuing	The product is going away permanently — plan around it, don't wait it out
availability	Available, Limited Availability, Unavailable — normalised (see limits)
therapeuticCategory	Anesthesia, Pediatric, Psychiatry, Oncology…
dosageForm / presentation / packageNdc / productNdcs	Exactly which pack is affected
route / pharmClass / rxcui / applicationNumbers	Clinical and regulatory identifiers for joining to your own data
firstPostedAt / updatedAt / daysInShortage	How long this has been going on
drugRecordsInShortage / drugCompaniesAffected / drugUnavailableCount	Per-drug context across the whole database — is one supplier struggling, or the entire market?

Monitor mode

Run it on a schedule and every record is labelled against the previous run:

changeType	Means
to_be_discontinued	The product is being withdrawn permanently — the highest-priority event
became_unavailable	Supply has stopped
resolved	The shortage is over
availability_change	Supply level moved (e.g. Available → Limited)
status_change	Any other status move
new_shortage	First time seen in this scope
unchanged	Nothing moved

The order is deliberate: it is what a pharmacy or procurement team has to act on first, not the order the fields happen to sit in. Turn on Output only changed records for a pure alert feed.

Input

Field	What it does
Drugs to watch	Generic names, matched as substrings — lisdexamfetamine finds Lisdexamfetamine Dimesylate Capsules. Empty = every drug.
Therapeutic categories	FDA's own categories.
Companies	The reporting manufacturer, substring match.
Statuses	Defaults to Current + To Be Discontinued; add Resolved for history.
Only fully unavailable	Drop partial and limited supply, keep the hard stops.
Monitor mode / Output only changed	The alert behaviour above.

Notes & limits

Properties of the source, measured rather than assumed:

• One drug is many records. FDA files a row per company and presentation — Lisdexamfetamine currently spans 90 records across 13 companies, Ropivacaine 49. Rows are kept faithful to the source, and the per-drug rollup fields give you the aggregate without losing the detail.
• The FDA data contains a typo, and it is handled. availability holds both Unavailable and the misspelled Unvailable. Filtering on the correct spelling silently drops the affected record, so availability is normalised — availabilityRaw keeps the original text so nothing is hidden.
• The whole database is downloaded every run (~1,700 records, two requests — openFDA caps limit at 1000 and rejects 1001). Filters are applied locally on purpose: a server-side filter could hide a record that later reappears and would then read as "new". It also keeps the per-drug rollups true to the entire database rather than to your slice.
• Resolved is rare — 25 records against 1,177 Current and 450 To Be Discontinued. FDA removes resolved entries rather than archiving them, so this is not a shortage history.
• Dates are the FDA's own posting dates, in MM/DD/YYYY, converted to ISO in the output.
• The Actor honours your Maximum cost per run and stops when the cap is reached.