rdrugshortages

Access drug shortage data in R. This package currently supports accessing the following databases

1. Drug Shortages Canada Canada-wide mandatory shortage reporting database. You must create an account to access the database via the API but you can search and export subsets of the data on the site.

2. Drug Product Database This database, by Health Canada, provides a current and historical snapshot of all available drug products, and includes supplementary information such as manufacturer information. There are no shortage reports in this database, but it can be used in conjunction with shortage reports by cross-referencing the Drug Identification Number (DIN) field.

Installation Instructions

install.packages('rdrugshortages')

# Or, install the latest development version:
devtools::install_github('pipitone/rdrugshortages')

Use

As mentioned above, you must create an account with Drug Shortages Canada (DSC) in order to access the database via the API. Once you have done this, you can put your credentials in your .Renviron file which gets loaded every time you start R:

# ~/.Renviron
dsc.email = "[email protected]"
dsc.password = "yourpassword"

You can check that this worked by typing the following into a new R session:

> Sys.getenv('dsc.email')
[1] "[email protected]"

You can access the search API via the function dsc_search(). This function will automatically attempt to log in to with your account credentials when you first use it, and then return the results of the search:

> results = dsc_search(term="diltiazem")
> head(results)
# A tibble: 6 x 93
     id created_date din   company_name atc_number atc_description discontinuation… updated_date status
  <int> <chr>        <chr> <chr>        <chr>      <chr>           <chr>            <chr>        <chr> 
1 81418 2019-04-11T… 0237… TEVA CANADA… C08DB      SELECTIVE CALC… 2019-03-15T00:0… 2019-04-11T… disco…
2 82552 2019-04-26T… 0237… TEVA CANADA… C08DB      SELECTIVE CALC… NA               2019-04-26T… activ…
3 82555 2019-04-26T… 0237… TEVA CANADA… C08DB      SELECTIVE CALC… NA               2019-04-26T… activ…
4 61340 2018-09-12T… 0237… TEVA CANADA… C08DB01    SELECTIVE CALC… NA               2018-10-11T… activ…
5  9901 2017-05-10T… 0237… ACTAVIS PHA… C08DB      SELECTIVE CALC… NA               2017-09-19T… resol…
6 81381 2019-04-11T… 0237… TEVA CANADA… C08DB      SELECTIVE CALC… 2019-01-09T00:0… 2019-04-11T… disco…

The result set returned by dsc_search() is a tibble which is based on the JSON blob returned by the API.

The full specification for the DSC API is available here.

Note that rdrugshortages assembles the entire result set by making multiple requests to the API when there are more results than can be returned by the API in a single request. You should be aware that API has been rate-limited to 1000 requests per hour.

To download the entire DSC database, simple run dsc_search() without any search terms.