Suppose you build tools that let an agent answer questions about medicines. Today the question is simple: pull authoritative product information straight from a drug maker. You start with the obvious names. Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, Roche, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, GSK, Sanofi, Bayer, AbbVie. You open apis.io to see what they publish.
The answer is nothing. The Pharmaceutical industry on apis.io has 720 member providers, and those ten publish zero APIs between them on the catalog. Johnson & Johnson publishes one. The people who make the drugs have, as far as this catalog can see, left you nothing to call.
You look at the shape of the whole industry. Of the 720 providers, 533 score in the minimal band, which is 74 percent. Only one is exemplar and three are strong. You also learn how membership works. It is computed from tags rather than from a fixed list, so the set mixes drug makers, pharmacies, e-prescribing networks, clinical data standards and the software companies that sell into all of them. The 720 rows hold 591 APIs, and only 187 of those count as published, meaning they come from contracts the provider ships rather than ones the catalog split or inferred.
So where does the industry's API surface live? You scan the top of the table. Veeva leads at 76.1, the only exemplar, with 9 APIs. DoseSpot is strong at 58.3 with 27, embedding Surescripts- and EPCS-certified e-prescribing in other vendors' software. Optum, also strong at 57.0, has 163 APIs, the largest surface in the set, and runs one of the largest pharmacy networks in the United States. Truepill and TraceLink are developing, at 53.4 with 30 APIs and 49.6 with 6. Walgreens is the only retail pharmacy with a real surface, and it is thin at 36.1 with 3 APIs. Every provider at the top sells to pharma or sits in the dispensing chain.
The drug makers, meanwhile, score on their websites rather than on APIs. Pfizer is at 1.5. Merck and Eli Lilly are at 3.6, Novartis at 4.5. GSK is the highest of the ten at 17.1. J&J reaches 25.0 with its single API.
Your first instinct is to read this as a failing grade. The post pushes back. This is a real pattern, not a gap in the crawl. A large drug maker's integration surface is almost always private: partner portals, EDI with wholesalers, serialization exchanges run through vendors like TraceLink, and clinical data moved through CROs and platforms like Veeva. The rubric measures the public API surface only, so a company whose integrations all run through intermediaries scores like a company with none. The fair reading is that pharma has outsourced its public interface to its vendors.
But that has a cost, and it lands on you. Drug makers do run patient programs, medical information requests, product labeling and adverse-event intake, all of which are public-facing, and agents now try to reach them. An agent that needs authoritative product information from a manufacturer finds nothing to call.
Then comes the part about the catalog's own record. Veeva's row reads 76.1 today. When it was profiled on 2026-10-04 it was 72.8, so it has moved up 3.3 since that earlier post. The industry's leader is a vendor, and it is still climbing, while the companies whose names you typed first sit near the floor.
What do you take away? First, when you need pharma data through an API, look at the vendors, not the manufacturers. Veeva, DoseSpot, Optum, Truepill and TraceLink are where the published contracts are. Second, a low score for a drug maker here means no public surface, not necessarily no integrations. Third, the fix is small. A manufacturer publishing even one public contract, such as product and label data, or a medical information request intake with a documented OpenAPI, could take the first exemplar slot held by an actual drug maker. Any of the ten could do it. Until then, the vendors are the industry's API.
Read the original: https://apis.io/2026/10/21/pharmaceutical-on-apis-io-the-drug-makers-publish-nothing-and-their-vendors-carry-the-industry/