Shortages Tracker

Open Shortages Tracker -- in the sidebar under Drugs.

The FDA shortage list on its own tells you a drug is short. It does not tell you whether that is a structural failure with no backup supplier or a temporary demand spike on a molecule with fifteen makers. Shortages Tracker adds that context: who is short, for how long, and whether anyone can fill the gap.

Header

• Pills -- drugs in shortage, the floor count of single-source shortages, drugs on a discontinuation notice and not short, and records updated in the last 30 days.
• The read -- the median age of the open shortage backlog and how many open shortages are single-source.
• The KPI strip -- hover any number for exactly how it is counted:

Read this first: notices are not shortages

The FDA list mixes two different things. Records with status TO BE DISCONTINUED are 506C discontinuation notices -- a manufacturer telling FDA it is dropping its own presentations, which other makers may still supply. They are not shortages, and Qope counts them separately everywhere:

• Timeline draws them as dashed rows and leaves them off until you turn on the Discontinuation notice chip.
• Supply gaps keeps the drug as a shortage when other presentations are still current, and adds an n being discontinued chip.
• Market exits marks a molecule that already carries a notice with an FDA discontinuation notice label: that exit is announced, not quiet.
• Landscape excludes them from every bar and count.
• Manufacturers reads a notice as a market exit rather than a supply gap, so it feeds the Withdrawing column and the risk score but never the Short now or Records figures. A company that has only filed notices still appears, with a Short now of zero, and the /n denominator beside it counts every molecule the company has on the list, notices included.
• Recent updates shows them under their own To be discontinued status.

The list is also a live snapshot, not a history. FDA updates records in place and drops a resolved shortage six months after it resolves. That is why the median shortage age is computed over open shortages only.

Every panel names the datasets it reads in its header, and the Sources line at the foot of the page gives each one's refresh date. If a source fails to answer, the page shows a Partial load note that says which figures are affected. Reload to retry.

Tabs

Timeline

The Chronic shortage timeline: one row per drug on the FDA list, drawn from first posting to today, or to FDA's last update on a resolved one. Solid bars are shortages, shaded by the share of presentations their makers report as unavailable or limited, and a pulse marks the ones still open.

• Above the chart: In shortage, On notice, not short, Median shortage age and Longest running.
• Filter by status (In shortage, Resolved, Discontinuation notice), by duration (< 6 mo, 6-12 mo, 1-2 yr, 2-5 yr, 5 yr +) and by therapeutic category. Reset filters sits in the same filter box.
• Rows sort by years short, longest first; click the column to reverse it. Hover a row for detail and click it to open the drug's profile.

Supply gaps

The most valuable tab. Supply-gap opportunities cross-joins active shortages to the Orange Book supplier base and to Medicare Part D prescribing, then ranks them. Each shortage is a card with its priority score, drug, manufacturer, therapy area, Part D lines and years short.

Each molecule gets a supplier tier:

The priority score (0-100) is supplier fragility multiplied by Medicare demand multiplied by duration:

Score = round(100 x fragility x demand x duration)

Turn on Structural only to keep single-source and thin-supply molecules, or pick one tier from the supplier-tier list.

Chips on each card:

• Supplier tier with the maker count -- click it to open the Orange Book for the molecule.
• n unavailable, n limited, n available -- presentations as their makers report them to FDA. Available presentations are what a buyer chases first.
• NADAC +n% since onset -- the change in median pharmacy acquisition price since the month before FDA first posted the shortage (or over twelve months where no earlier price exists).
• n exited MDRP -- parent companies that terminated NDCs for this drug in the Medicaid rebate program. The supply base is shrinking beyond what the FDA record shows.
• n being discontinued -- discontinuation notices on other presentations of a drug that is short.
• n ANDA -- approved generic applications on the molecule, with a note if a Reference Listed Drug is on file for a new filer to reference.
• The FDA status and stated reason, and Presentations (n), which expands to show which presentations are gone and which are still shipping.

Notes on how to read the numbers:

• Supplier counts are distinct Orange Book applicants that still market an approved product for the molecule by the same route as the short product, so oral makers do not read as a backup for an injection shortage. Listings flagged discontinued are excluded, since they are not a backup a buyer can switch to. A >= prefix means the listing was longer than Qope pages through, so the count is a floor.
• Demand is Medicare Part D prescriber-drug lines for the whole molecule across all dosage forms, from the 2024 data year. It is a breadth measure, not spend. An injection-only shortage of a common oral molecule will still show a large number.
• Hospital-administered (Part B) drugs legitimately show no Part D demand and are scored neutrally rather than as zero.
• Combination products resolve to no supplier tier, no demand count and no rebate exit, because each of those matches would silently resolve to a single component.
• NADAC prices retail pharmacy purchases, so most sterile injectables carry no price at all.

Export downloads the cards left by your filters as CSV, score columns included.

Market exits

Quiet market exits -- early warning. Labelers that have pulled or scheduled NDCs out of the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, for molecules the FDA shortage list carries no shortage of in that dosage form. A rebate listing for an oral tablet still shows here when only the injection is short, because it is not the supply that is short. Supply exits often appear here quarters before a shortage is declared.

• Rows are grouped by molecule, and labelers are counted by parent company, so two arms of one firm do not read as two exits. Columns: molecule, labelers exited, sample labelers, NDCs, MDRP single-source, cost over 12 months and last termination.
• Multiple independent labelers leaving the same molecule is the strongest signal. The tab badge counts molecules that lost two or more.
• Termination dates are often set in the future. Those rows carry a scheduled marker on the date and an (n sched.) note on the NDC count, and are not yet in effect.
• MDRP single-source is the share of terminated NDCs flagged category S in the rebate file. It is not the Orange Book supplier tier used on Supply gaps.
• Cost 12 mo is the change in median NADAC acquisition price over the last twelve months, looked up for the molecules with the most labeler exits. A Cost rising while labelers walk away callout lists molecules whose price rose at least 10% while suppliers left.
• Terminations with a later reactivation are excluded.
• Molecules already short in the same dosage form appear in Supply gaps instead, marked with an exited MDRP chip.

Open in full table opens the rebate terminations table, and Export downloads the rows as CSV.

Landscape

• Therapeutic categories most affected -- shortage records per category. FDA tags a record with every category it touches, so a record counts toward each one and the bars sum to more than the record count. Click a bar to open Recent updates filtered to that category.
• Last revised -- a 12-month sparkline of when each shortage record was last revised. Because this is a live snapshot, each record is counted once at its latest revision, so recent months always dominate. Most revisions are stamped reverified -- a record FDA touched without changing it -- so the bars measure how often FDA touches the file, not how much the shortage picture changed.
• By shortage reason and By dosage form -- the stated reasons and the dosage forms on the list.

Manufacturers

Manufacturer reliability -- every company on the FDA shortage list, ranked by a risk score built from how much of the open list it owns, how long its gaps stay open, and whether it is also withdrawing product. Columns: company, Short now, median open age, Records, Withdrawing and Risk. Entities that FDA labels with a parent (for example HOSPIRA, INC., A PFIZER COMPANY) are rolled up under that parent; hover the entity count on a rolled-up row to see its constituents. Subsidiaries FDA does not tag stay separate, so a few groups remain split. A structural count flags molecules where the company's absence leaves little or no approved backup.

Risk score (0-100) = round(55 x breadth + 30 x persistence x square root of breadth + 15 x withdrawal)

The score is a read of concentration and persistence, not a judgment of manufacturing quality. Export downloads the scorecard as CSV.

Recent updates

Recent shortage updates -- one row per drug, most recently revised first, with manufacturer, therapy area, dosage form, presentation count, status, stated reason and revision date. Long names wrap to two lines so every column fits.

• Status chips (In shortage, Resolved, To be discontinued) and the All therapy areas list filter the table; Clear removes both.
• The watch icon on a row adds the drug to Radar, and the drug name opens its profile.
• Open in full table opens the FDA shortages table with the same filters.

FDA re-verifies most of the list on the same day, so the revision date rarely separates entries. Within a date, the drugs listed across the most presentation records are shown first. The revision date is the last time FDA touched the record, not the date the shortage began.

Filter parity

The full FDA shortages table filters on exact values, and its filter splits values on commas. Where a link would return different rows than this page shows, Qope does not send you there:

• When you filter Recent updates to a category that FDA also tags alongside other categories, the Open in full table button is replaced by a greyed Not filterable in full table chip that explains why on hover.
• Category and dosage-form values that contain a comma are shown as plain text instead of links.

See Data Caveats.