About the data
Methodology
Pillstats is built entirely from public regulatory and pricing data. This page documents where every number comes from, how entities are constructed, and — just as important — what the data does not say.
Sources & refresh cadence
openFDA NDC Directory (US FDA) — drugs, labelers, product registrations, package NDCs, and marketing start/end dates. Ingested weekly (Mondays). The FDA source itself refreshes daily.
CMS NADAC (National Average Drug Acquisition Cost) — per-unit US price benchmarks keyed to 11-digit NDCs, published weekly by CMS. Ingested weekly (Thursdays, after the midweek CMS release).
Raw source snapshots are archived before parsing, and every ingest anomaly is logged rather than silently corrected. Coverage today is US-only; UK, Canada, and Australia are planned.
What a “drug” is here
A drug page represents a drug concept: the combination of generic name, dosage form, and route of administration (e.g. metoprolol succinate · extended-release tablet · oral). Different strengths and package sizes of the same concept are grouped on one page; different dosage forms are separate pages. Mapping to RxNorm concepts and ATC therapeutic classes is in progress and will refine this grouping.
Manufacturer entity resolution
FDA labeler names are free text, so the same company appears under many spellings (“Walgreens”, “Walgreens Co”, “Walgreen's Corporation”). Counting those as separate suppliers would overstate competition — and hide sole-supplier risk. Pillstats resolves name variants into canonical entities in two layers:
Automatic (conservative): names that are identical after normalizing case, punctuation, and trailing legal suffixes (Inc, LLC, Corp…) are linked automatically on every ingest.
Curated:fuzzier matches — typos, word-order differences, “doing business as” filings — are machine-proposed but human-reviewed before merging. Rejected candidates are kept on record so demonstrably distinct companies with similar names (they exist!) are never merged.
Original labeler strings are never discarded: each profile lists the names an entity files under, and supplier counts across the site are canonical-entity counts. Distinct legal entities under common ownership (e.g. numbered distribution subsidiaries) are kept separate; parent-company mapping is a planned, separate layer.
Supplier status & counts
A manufacturer is counted as an active supplierof a drug when it holds at least one US product registration without a marketing end-date. “Sole supplier” means exactly one active canonical entity holds registrations for that drug concept. A registration lapsing is a signal, not proof, of a supply exit — labelers sometimes re-register.
The labeler named on an NDC is the company responsible for the product's marketing — which may differ from the company that physically manufactures it. Facility-level data (FDA establishment registrations and inspections) is on the roadmap.
How to read the prices
NADAC measures what US retail pharmacies pay to acquire a drug, surveyed by CMS — it is a benchmark of one specific point in the supply chain. It is not a retail price, not what patients pay, not a manufacturer list price, and not a quote.
Trend charts average per-unit NADAC across all NDCs of a drug concept, carrying each NDC's last-known price forward between repricings so weekly averages aren't skewed by whichever packages happened to reprice that week.
Limitations
Rx and OTC products are both covered and labeled; supply-concentration framing is most meaningful for prescription drugs. Data is only as current as the last weekly ingest. Entity resolution is conservative by design, so some name variants may not yet be merged. Nothing on this site is medical advice; clinical information lives at DailyMed, which drug pages link to.
Citing Pillstats
Link the specific drug or manufacturer page you reference. Underlying data originates from US public sources (openFDA, CMS); Pillstats adds entity resolution, supply-concentration analysis, and price-trend context. For questions about the data, contact hello@pillstats.com.