@pipeworx/ca-drug-price-transparency

Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp — every tool in the catalog, including @pipeworx/ca-drug-price-transparency’s. Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 3

California manufacturer disclosures of prescription drug list-price (WAC) increases and new-drug launch prices — the reports drug makers are required to file under California’s Cost Transparency Rx (CTRx) law. Read live; keyless.

Tools

• ca_rx_wac_increases(drug?, manufacturer?, ndc?, year?, limit?) — manufacturer disclosures of a WAC increase past the statutory threshold. Returns the increase amount, the WAC after increase, and the effective date.
• ca_rx_wac_five_year_history(ndc, year?, limit?) — the 5-year WAC history a manufacturer must disclose alongside each increase report for that NDC.
• ca_rx_new_drug_launches(drug?, manufacturer?, year?, limit?) — manufacturer disclosures of a NEW drug launched with a WAC above the Medicare Part D specialty-drug threshold, with estimated patient population and any breakthrough-therapy/priority-review designation.

All three default to searching every available report year (2019–present) when year is omitted, and return a count + years_searched summary before any records; a no-match response names the filters tried rather than an empty array.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• California Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI), Cost Transparency Rx (CTRx) program — manufacturer WAC increase reports, their 5-year increase histories, and new-drug introduction reports. Published as open datasets with one monthly (in-progress current year) and one closed annual file per year back to 2019.

Coverage — why this pack is California-only (fleet #3245 survey, 2026-10-18)

Several states run a manufacturer WAC/launch-price disclosure law similar to California’s. Surveyed before building, because CLAUDE.md’s “one pack per jurisdiction” rule means a second state with genuinely structured public data gets its own pack, not a state argument here — the schemas and even the reporting thresholds differ per state, and a multiplexed pack cannot describe either honestly:

“Not structured” means no CSV/Excel/API was found publishing the underlying manufacturer-filed records — only a narrative PDF report summarizing them, which would require manual transcription rather than ingestion. Re-verify before assuming this is permanent: states have moved from PDF-only to a real dataset before (this is exactly what California’s own CTRx program did).

Traps

Two header shapes per dataset, and they are not cosmetic. HCAI’s “in-progress current year” resource uses snake_case machine column names (manufacturer_name, wac_effective_date, wac_increase_amount as a JSON number). Every CLOSED annual archive (2019 through last full year) uses human Title-Case column names with spaces (“Manufacturer Name”, “WAC Effective Date”) and stringifies the same amounts — the 5-year-history resource further prefixes them with ”$” and commas in BOTH shapes. Matching on one spelling silently drops every year that doesn’t use it; every normalizer here reads both.

CKAN’s q full-text parameter is not a substring filter on the field you think you’re searching. Measured 2026-10-18: q=Pfizer against a 1,251-row resource with zero rows naming Pfizer anywhere still returned total: 151 — it ranks relevance across every text column, including long narrative fields like “General Comments”, and is capped by that ranking rather than by an exact match. A real hit outside the top-ranked slice could be silently missed. This pack uses datastore_search_sql (also keyless, confirmed live) with an explicit ILIKE on the exact column being searched instead.

Resource ids are resolved live, not hardcoded. The “current year” resource becomes a dated archive every January, the same way CMS’s NADAC dataset id rotates (see mcps/drug-prices), and HCAI’s own id for it is not guaranteed stable across that rollover. resolveResources() reads CKAN’s package_show and classifies every resource by its NAME; a hardcoded last-known-good map (captured 2026-10-18) is the fallback only if that live lookup itself fails.

The 5-year-history dataset can contain overlapping entries for the same NDC. Each filed WAC Increase Report re-states the preceding 5 years of history as of its own effective date, so a drug that had two increases in the same window produces two reports whose history windows overlap. That is a property of what HCAI publishes, not a dedup bug — ca_rx_wac_five_year_history returns every filed history row rather than silently collapsing them.

WAC is the manufacturer’s published list price, not what anyone actually pays. For the retail acquisition cost or the Medicare Part B payment limit, see mcps/drug-prices (nadac_price / asp_payment_limit) — this pack answers “what did the manufacturer disclose”, not “what does a pharmacy or Medicare pay”.

Tools

• ca_rx_wac_increases — California manufacturer disclosures of a prescription drug’s Wholesale Acquisition Cost (WAC — the published list price before rebates/discounts) going UP. Required by California law (SB 17/AB 265) wh
• ca_rx_wac_five_year_history — The 5-year WAC increase history California requires manufacturers to disclose alongside each WAC Increase Report — every prior increase for that NDC over the preceding 5 calendar years, with its date
• ca_rx_new_drug_launches — California manufacturer disclosures of a NEW prescription drug launched with a Wholesale Acquisition Cost (WAC — published list price) exceeding the Medicare Part D specialty-drug cost threshold — Cal