FDA Medical Device Shortages & Discontinuance List Actor

What does FDA Medical Device Shortages and Discontinuance List Actor do?

This Actor scrapes the FDA's official Section 506J Medical Device Shortage List and Device Discontinuance List — the two tables FDA publishes at fda.gov/medical-devices/.../medical-device-shortages-list identifying devices currently in shortage (per the FD&C Act's Section 506J reporting requirement) and devices whose manufacture has been permanently discontinued. It returns a normalized, per-row export covering both tables — shortage category, product code, availability/duration, interruption reason, and shortage date for active shortages; date posted, category, product code, manufacturer, device trade name, and discontinuance reason for discontinued devices — pulled directly from FDA's own published tables.

Why use this FDA medical device shortage scraper?

• Hospital & GPO sourcing teams — monitor active device shortages and permanent discontinuances to plan substitute sourcing before a supply gap hits patient care.
• Medical device distributors — track category-level shortage/discontinuance signals across the FDA's regulated device categories.
• Medtech market researchers & analysts — build a structured dataset of supply-chain disruption events without manually parsing FDA's HTML tables.
• Regulatory affairs teams — cross-reference a manufacturer or product code against FDA's authoritative shortage/discontinuance record.

How to use FDA Medical Device Shortages and Discontinuance List Actor

1. Click Try for free.
2. Leave the default Start URLs field as-is — it already points at FDA's medical device shortages page (this is a single static page containing both tables, not a multi-page directory).
3. Optionally set maxItems to cap how many rows are scraped (default 200, enough to capture both tables in full as of 2026-08-06 — 6 shortage + 145 discontinuance rows).
4. Click Start and wait for the run to finish (typically well under a minute — both tables load in a single page fetch).
5. Download the results from the Dataset tab in JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML.

Input

Field	Type	Description
startUrls	array (required)	FDA medical device shortages page(s). Defaults to the official page — normally leave as-is.
maxItems	integer (default 200)	Maximum rows to scrape, across both tables combined.
delaySeconds	number (default 1.0)	Polite delay before each page fetch. Raise to 30 if you add extra start URLs, per FDA's robots.txt Crawl-Delay: 30 for general crawlers.
concurrency	integer (default 1)	How many start URLs to fetch at once. Defaults to sequential to respect FDA's crawl-delay guidance; irrelevant for the normal single-URL case.

Output

Shortage-list row:

{
  "listType": "shortage",
  "shortageCategory": "Neurology – Neurosurgical, Neurointerventional and Neurodiagnostic Devices",
  "productCodeDescription": "HBA(Neurosurgical pattie)",
  "availabilityEstimatedDuration": "Estimated through Q4 2026",
  "additionalInformation": "Neurosurgical patties, sponges & strip products are in shortage...",
  "interruptionReason506J": "Shortage or discontinuance of a component, part or accessory of the device.",
  "shortageDate": "2026/05/06 initial",
  "sourceRowOrder": 1,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-06T00:18:15.974434+00:00"
}

Discontinuance-list row:

{
  "listType": "discontinuance",
  "discontinuanceDatePosted": "6/16/2026",
  "discontinuanceCategory": "GENERAL & PLASTIC SURGERY - Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery Devices",
  "discontinuanceProductCode": "FTM",
  "manufacturerName": "DSM Biomedical Inc",
  "deviceTradeName": "XCM Biologic® Tissue Matrix",
  "reasonForDiscontinuance": "Discontinuance of the manufacture of the device",
  "sourceRowOrder": 1,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-06T00:18:15.974434+00:00"
}

Every dataset item carries all fields from both shapes (empty string for whichever list it isn't from) — filter on listType to isolate one table.

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Data table

Field	Description
listType	shortage or discontinuance — which FDA table this row came from
shortageCategory	(shortage rows) Device category
productCodeDescription	(shortage rows) FDA product code + description
availabilityEstimatedDuration	(shortage rows) Availability and estimated shortage duration
additionalInformation	(shortage rows) Free-text additional context
interruptionReason506J	(shortage rows) Reason for interruption per Section 506J
shortageDate	(shortage rows) Date posted/updated
discontinuanceDatePosted	(discontinuance rows) Date posted
discontinuanceCategory	(discontinuance rows) Device category
discontinuanceProductCode	(discontinuance rows) FDA product code
manufacturerName	(discontinuance rows) Manufacturer name
deviceTradeName	(discontinuance rows) Device trade name
reasonForDiscontinuance	(discontinuance rows) Reason for discontinuance
sourceRowOrder	1-indexed row position within its source table
scrapedAt	ISO-8601 UTC scrape timestamp

Pricing

$5.99 per 1,000 results. Example costs: 100 results ≈ $0.60, 500 results ≈ $3.00, 1,000 results ≈ $5.99, 5,000 results ≈ $29.95. Single-request, no-detail-page-fetch design (both tables load in one page fetch), pricing set slightly above the sibling FDA AI-Enabled Medical Devices Actor to reflect normalizing two distinct tables into one dataset.

Tips or advanced options

• Run on a schedule (e.g. weekly) to catch newly-added shortages or discontinuances as FDA updates the list — listType + sourceRowOrder make new additions easy to diff against a prior run.
• Filter the dataset on listType == "shortage" for active supply-chain risk monitoring, or listType == "discontinuance" for permanent-substitution planning.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

This Actor scrapes only FDA's publicly-published medical device shortage and discontinuance lists — no login is required and no personal/private data is collected. Data accuracy depends on FDA's published records at scrape time; always confirm against the official FDA source for regulatory-critical decisions. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FDA. Found a bug or need a custom field/filter? Open an issue in the Actor's Issues tab.