EURIPID: the European medicine price database, and who can use it

What it is

EURIPID (the European Integrated Price Information Database) is a shared database of national medicine prices maintained by a voluntary, non-profit collaboration of the pricing and reimbursement authorities of European countries, with Austria’s national public health institute (Gesundheit Österreich GmbH) among those managing it. Participating authorities upload the official prices they publish under the Transparency Directive, in a standard format, so that other authorities can compare them.

It holds the official prices of publicly reimbursed medicines, mainly for outpatient use: list prices at the rungs each country publishes, mapped to a common structure. It does not hold confidential discounts or net prices, hospital tender prices, or non-reimbursed products, and its coverage of each country is only as good as that country’s published list.

Who can use it

Access is exclusively for national competent authorities that have agreed to the collaboration’s rules and participate actively. Manufacturers, wholesalers, parallel traders, consultancies and data vendors cannot subscribe. There is no public search.

The reason is the purpose: EURIPID exists to support external reference pricing and price negotiation by payers, and its value to them depends on companies not being able to see or game the comparison in advance.

Why it still matters to companies

Because the authorities use it. When a payer references prices abroad, EURIPID is increasingly the source, which means:

• the published list price in every participating country feeds every other participating country’s reference basket, quickly;
• a price cut, a delisting or a currency swing in a small market will be seen, and acted on, elsewhere;
• confidential discounts stay invisible to it, which is one reason net prices and list prices have drifted apart across Europe.

For a manufacturer planning launch sequence and list prices, the question “what will EURIPID show about this product next quarter” is a real one.

What everyone else uses

Companies and traders reconstruct the same picture from the public sources, country by country: the national lists described in the publication guide, aligned to a common price type and kept current. That is laborious, which is why commercial databases exist, MPA’s among them, and why most of the effort in any of them goes into alignment and maintenance rather than collection.

Published summaries from the EURIPID collaboration and the PPRI network (country reports, glossaries, policy studies) are public and are the best free reference on how each country’s pricing system works.

MPA’s prices dataset covers the published official prices for the markets it tracks, aligned by price type, with the source and date on each record.