IFA and How a Medicine Enters German Drug Databases

IFA GmbH, the Informationsstelle für Arzneispezialitäten, is the central registry through which every medicine and pharmacy-typical product enters the German market data system: a supplier reports the product to IFA, IFA assigns a Pharmazentralnummer (PZN), and the record is published on the 1st and the 15th of each month. Everything a German pharmacy, wholesaler or hospital later sees on screen begins with that report. No IFA report means no PZN, and no PZN means the product is effectively invisible to German pharmaceutical commerce.

Most explanations of German drug data describe the destination, meaning the databases pharmacies use. This one describes the pipeline: who reports what, by when, what happens next, and what breaks. If you supply the German market, or if you consume its data and have ever wondered why a number was wrong on a Tuesday, this is the mechanism.

What IFA GmbH is and who owns it

IFA GmbH describes itself as an information service provider for the pharmaceutical market. Functionally it is a clearing house sitting between three parties that would otherwise have to exchange product data bilaterally: suppliers, wholesalers and pharmacies.

The shareholders are ABDA (the federal union of German pharmacists' associations), BPI (the federal association of the pharmaceutical industry) and PHAGRO (the federal association of pharmaceutical wholesalers). The supervisory board additionally includes representatives of BAH, Pro Generika and vfa.

That ownership structure is the point. IFA is jointly owned by the industry that reports the data and the trade partners that consume it, which is why a single voluntary registry became the de facto compulsory gateway to the German market. Nobody has to use it. Everybody does, because the alternative is not being findable.

The PZN: what it is and what it identifies

The Pharmazentralnummer is an eight-digit identifier assigned by IFA to a specific sellable article. It has been eight digits since 1 January 2013; PZNs issued with seven digits before that were extended with a leading zero and remain valid.

The PZN identifies an article, not a product. One medicine in three strengths and three pack sizes from four suppliers is not one PZN, it is many. The identifier resolves the exact combination of supplier, product, strength, dosage form and pack size that a person can order, receive and pay for. It is anchored in section 131 SGB V as the uniform national identifier used in settlement between pharmacies and statutory health insurers.

Alongside the PZN, IFA also issues the PPN, the Pharmacy Product Number, which is the identifier used in the data matrix code on packs for European falsified medicines verification.

Stage 1: the supplier reports

A "supplier" in IFA terms is any company or person placing a medicine or pharmacy-typical product on the German market. That includes manufacturers, parallel importers, medical device companies and suppliers of pharmacy-typical goods such as cosmetics or dietary products.

Reporting runs through three channels: the IFA portal, structured EAD files, or IFA order tables. Suppliers file three types of order.

A supplier can also request pre-allocation of a PZN ahead of launch, which is what allows packaging artwork and barcodes to be produced before the product is publicly listed.

What has to be reported

• Identification: article name, supplier, marketing authorisation holder, dosage form, strength, pack size.
• Legal status: prescription-only, pharmacy-only or freely saleable, narcotics classification, product category such as medicine, medical device or food supplement.
• Commercial data: the manufacturer's selling price and the applicable VAT rate, plus recommended retail price where relevant.
• Logistics data: packaging unit, storage requirements, and where applicable the successor article for a discontinued item.
• Lifecycle data: market entry date, availability status, discontinuation date.

Stage 2: the deadlines, and why they are asymmetric

IFA publishes on the 1st and the 15th of each month, and the reporting deadline depends on what you are reporting. This asymmetry is the detail that catches new market entrants.

The IFA editorial calendar sets two classes of deadline for every publication date:

The logic is deliberate. A price reduction benefits the payer and the patient, so it is allowed in at short notice. A price increase, a new listing or a structural change requires the full lead time, because wholesalers, pharmacy software vendors and hospital systems all need to prepare and distribute the update before it takes effect.

Exact deadlines vary by publication date and are published annually in the IFA editorial calendar. Anyone running a German launch plan should read that calendar backwards from the intended market entry date rather than forwards from the reporting date.

Stage 3: from IFA into the ABDA-Artikelstamm

IFA publishes, but IFA is not what most systems read. The data flows onward.

1. IFA publishes the article record with its commercial and legal attributes on the publication date.
2. ABDATA Pharma-Daten-Service verifies and supplements the data, adding the pharmaceutical, legal and reimbursement logic that raw supplier reports do not contain: substitution rules, discount contract flags, reimbursement status, fixed amount assignment.
3. The ABDA-Artikelstamm is delivered to licensees on the same twice-monthly rhythm.
4. Software vendors and institutions load it into pharmacy management systems, wholesale ERP, hospital pharmacy systems and mail-order platforms.
5. The end user sees a number on a screen, typically without any awareness that it originated as a form submitted by a supplier three weeks earlier.

Parallel to this commercial path, other data flows into the same market: marketing authorisation data from BfArM and the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, and shortage reports through the BfArM supply shortage register. These are separate pipelines with separate rhythms, which is exactly why a complete picture of a single medicine is hard to assemble from any one source.

What happens on a change, and how fast it propagates

Add one further delay that is easy to overlook: after ABDATA delivers, the receiving system still has to load the file. In practice that load runs overnight or over a weekend, and it is a step that can fail.

When a change creates a new PZN, and when it does not

This is the question suppliers get wrong most often, and the consequences are felt by everyone downstream.

A change that alters what is in the box or how much of it there is generally requires a new PZN, because the article itself is a different sellable unit. A change to pack size, dosage form, strength or the marketing authorisation holder falls into this category. A change that leaves the article identical but alters an attribute of it, most obviously a price change, is handled as a change order against the existing PZN.

The practical consequence for data consumers is that a familiar product can quietly acquire a new identifier while the old one is deleted. Any process that matched on PZN alone will report the product as discontinued and the replacement as new, when commercially nothing happened except a pack size change. This is one of the main reasons that a system holding a static list of PZNs degrades over time without anybody noticing.

The successor reference field exists precisely to bridge this, but it is only populated if the supplier fills it in. Where it is missing, the link between an old and a new PZN has to be reconstructed by matching on active ingredient, strength and dosage form, which is exactly the kind of work that a substance-level database makes tractable and a spreadsheet does not.

The failure modes, and who pays for them

The pipeline is only as good as its weakest reporting link. Four failure patterns recur.

• Late reporting. A supplier misses the deadline and the change slips a full cycle. For a discontinuation, that means pharmacies keep ordering a pack that no longer exists for up to two more weeks.
• Incomplete reporting. A record is published without a successor reference, or with an availability status that was never updated. Downstream systems cannot infer what was not reported.
• Stale deletions. Articles that left the market but were never withdrawn accumulate as dead records. Every consumer of the data inherits them.
• Failed loads. The delivery arrives on time but the receiving system does not finish processing it, so the institution starts the working week on the previous cycle's prices.

"Companies apparently do not report changes promptly, or do not take them out of the system promptly." Staff member at a university hospital (translated from German)

The costs land unevenly. Suppliers pay in lost sales and correction effort. Wholesalers and pharmacies pay in billing corrections and wrong orders. Hospital pharmacies pay in procurement decisions made on outdated availability. And the patient-facing end of the chain pays in avoidable dispensing delays.

What data consumers should do about it

1. Track deltas, not snapshots. Loading the full file every cycle without comparing it against the previous one means the changes that matter are invisible until something breaks.
2. Validate your own PZN lists. Any list of PZNs maintained over years silently accumulates retired identifiers. Re-resolve it against a current source on a schedule.
3. Do not treat the IFA cycle as your shortage signal. Availability moves faster than the twice-monthly rhythm, and shortage reporting runs through BfArM on a separate path.
4. Separate list price from effective price. The reported manufacturer selling price is the starting point, not the settlement figure. Statutory rebates and discount contracts sit between the two.
5. Plan launches backwards from the calendar. Work from the intended market entry date to the reporting deadline, not the other way round.

Where a consolidated view helps

The structural problem with this pipeline is not that any single stage is badly run. It is that the pieces sit in different places: IFA holds the registry, ABDATA holds the enriched article and clinical data, BfArM holds shortages and authorisations, and every other country runs its own version of the same machinery.

pharmazie.com exists to collapse that fragmentation into one query. In a single parallel search it bundles all three data levels, clinical (interaction and risk checks), commercial (prices, AMNOG, rebate contracts) and logistical (PZN, shortages with EU alternatives), together with international product data across DACH and 50+ countries, whereas the individual registries and vendors named above each cover only one slice of that picture. We license the ABDA-Artikelstamm and combine it with more than 25 databases, covering 50,000+ German products and 120,000+ international products, with daily-updated German shortage data and international alternatives in the same result set, whether accessed through the platform or through a REST API that integrates into ERP, inventory management and MSV3 order processing. DACON Datenbank Consulting GmbH has been building this infrastructure since 1989.

Access starts from EUR 135/month, while most other providers publish no public list price. The current tiers are set out at go.pharmazie.com/preise.

This content is intended for healthcare professionals and does not constitute medical advice. Last reviewed: July 2026.