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TL;DRIFA stands for Informationsstelle für Arzneispezialitäten. The IFA GmbH, based in Frankfurt am Main, is the joint clearing house of German pharmacies, pharmaceutical wholesalers and the pharmaceutical industry, and it assigns the Pharmazentralnummer (PZN) that identifies every product sold through a German pharmacy.
Almost every number on a German medicine package traces back to this one organisation, yet IFA itself is rarely described accurately. It is not a database vendor, not a price list, and not a regulator. It is infrastructure: a neutral body that collects what manufacturers report and hands identifiers back to the market. Understanding that distinction decides who you actually need a contract with, which is why the term causes so much confusion in data procurement conversations.
IFA was founded in 1987 and is held by three associations, each representing one side of the German pharmacy market:
| Shareholder | Represents | Full name |
|---|---|---|
| ABDA | Pharmacies | Bundesvereinigung Deutscher Apothekerverbände |
| BPI | Pharmaceutical industry | Bundesverband der Pharmazeutischen Industrie |
| PHAGRO | Pharmaceutical wholesale | Bundesverband des Pharmazeutischen Großhandels |
Representatives of those three, together with the BAH, Pro Generika and the vfa, sit on the administrative board. A common error is to call the BAH a shareholder: it sits on the board but does not hold the company. André Maske has been managing director since 2024.
That ownership structure is the whole point. Manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies have directly opposing commercial interests but depend on the same article data to trade with each other at all. IFA is the neutral ground where that shared data is maintained, which is why no single market side controls it.
IFA collects economic, legal and logistical data on medicines, medical devices and other goods available in German pharmacies, and it issues three identifier types.
| Identifier | What it is | Scope | Legal or standards basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| PZN | Pharmazentralnummer, eight digits including a check digit, the unique key for a product and pack size | Germany | German market standard, used in pharmacy billing and wholesale ordering |
| PPN | Pharmacy Product Number, which embeds the PZN in an internationally unambiguous form | International | IFA acts as an issuing agency under ISO/IEC standards |
| UDI-DI | Unique Device Identification for medical devices | EU | IFA is an issuing entity under EU Regulations 2017/745 (MDR) and 2017/746 (IVDR) |
The PZN is the one most people mean when they say IFA. It is worth being precise that a PZN identifies a specific pack of a specific product from a specific supplier, not a substance and not a brand. Two pack sizes of the same medicine carry two different PZNs, which is exactly why the number works as a primary key and exactly why substance-level questions cannot be answered with a PZN alone.
The flow runs in one direction, and each step is a place where data can go stale:
The critical operational fact: the IFA information services are published on the 1st and 15th of each month. This is why German price changes and distribution status changes cluster on those two dates instead of arriving continuously. Any system consuming this data has to be built around a twice monthly rhythm, and any pricing analysis that ignores it will misread the effective date of a change.
This is the distinction that gets blurred most often when teams compare data offers, and getting it wrong leads to negotiating with the wrong party.
| Layer | Who | Role | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source layer | IFA GmbH | Assigns identifiers, collects reported article data, publishes information services | The raw information service, in its original format and twice monthly rhythm |
| Product layer | Data recipients and database providers | License the information services and process them into usable products | Linked, enriched, searchable data with clinical and regulatory context |
So the question "should we buy from IFA or from a database provider" is usually the wrong question. The identifier comes from IFA either way. What differs is who processes it, how deeply it is linked to other data, and what your licence permits you to do with it. If you need the raw information service in its original delivery format, that is a licence you take at the source. If you need the data linked to clinical, regulatory and availability context and queryable, that is the product layer.
Both have an equivalent function, but neither has an equivalent organisation, and the identifiers are not interchangeable. This trips up anyone extending a German data model across DACH.
| Country | Body | Primary identifier | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | IFA GmbH, Frankfurt am Main | PZN, eight digits | Owned jointly by ABDA, BPI and PHAGRO |
| Austria | ARGE Pharma at the Fachverband der Chemischen Industrie Österreichs, with DATACARE | Austrian PZN, six digits plus a check digit | Combined with country code 90 and the ARGE Pharma identifier 8888 to form the NTIN |
| Switzerland | Stiftung Refdata, Zug | GTIN under Global Company Prefix 7680 | Refdata is the exclusive licensee of GCP 7680 for Swissmedic approved articles and also assigns GLNs |
The practical consequence is blunt: the German and Austrian PZN are different numbers and cannot be used interchangeably. A six digit Austrian PZN is not a truncated German one. Any cross border article matching has to run through an international identifier such as the PPN or GTIN, not through the national PZN.
pharmazie.com is not an IFA data outlet. The identifiers reach the platform through the licensed ABDA article master data, where the PZN acts as the primary key across all connected databases and the neighbouring identifiers sit alongside it in the article base data.
One honest limitation: if what you need is the raw IFA information service itself, in its original delivery format and on its original twice monthly rhythm, that is a licence you take out at the source. No aggregator replaces it, and any provider claiming otherwise is describing a processed product, not the source feed.
