ProPublica on Friday published previously unpublished data linking generic drugs to the factories that make them. This data powers Rx Inspector, a revolutionary tool that allows you to search the factories where generic drugs are manufactured and their Food and Drug Administration inspection records.
This data, created by ProPublica by linking several FDA datasets, has never been made available by the FDA before. This allows anyone to associate prescriptions with the facility where they are manufactured by linking the National Drug Code number to the FDA facility identifier of the drug manufacturing facility.
You can access the data on Github from here.
Academic researchers said this data will greatly contribute to research assessing the quality and availability of generic drugs.
“This circumvents an incredibly time-consuming barrier for people who want to do pharmaceutical and manufacturing-related research,” said John Gray, a professor at Ohio State University.
Gray and his team are working on assigning quality scores to generic drugs based on risk. The goal is to enable government purchasers, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to purchase drugs based on quality, not just cost.
This data also includes basic information about each facility, such as the country in which the facility is located and the name of the company that registered the facility.
The methodology we used to link FDA drug and facility identifiers is complex and is explained in our full methodology. To obtain some of the data, ProPublica had to sue the agency.
We know that much of what is shown here is likely to be incomplete. For example, one company may have acquired another company or moved manufacturing to another location, so the FDA information may be out of date. However, we believe this is an important first step in unraveling a process that authorities and drug companies have been trying to keep secret from consumers.
This data is published under a Creative Commons license. This means you can use it for non-commercial purposes as long as you attribute it to ProPublica and link back to Rx Inspector.
