Ca Drug Price Transparency

@pipeworx/ca-drug-price-transparency

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.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1875+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

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".

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ca-drug-price-transparency": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ca-drug-price-transparency/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ca-drug-price-transparency/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1875+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ca_rx_wac_increases \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"manufacturer":"Aadi Bioscience"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ca_rx_wac_increases. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ca-drug-price-transparency": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-ca-drug-price-transparency"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-ca-drug-price-transparency

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Ca Drug Price Transparency data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT