meps

What Americans actually take, and what for — US prescription drug use by medical condition, from AHRQ's Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

MEPS surveys the whole US civilian non-institutionalized population: every payer, every age, commercially insured and uninsured alike. It is the only source in this catalog that links a prescription to the condition it was written for, which is what makes "what do people take for depression" answerable at all.

Tools

Conditions are taken in plain words — "depression", "high cholesterol", "type 2 diabetes" — or as a CCSR code such as MBD002. Drug names are MEPS's cleaned generic names, so atorvastatin, not Lipitor.

These are survey estimates, and the sample is always in the response

Every respondent carries a weight projecting them onto roughly 18,000 Americans. A cell backed by three people therefore produces a confident-looking "55,000 people" that means almost nothing. So:

• every row carries sample_persons — the real respondents behind it;
• reliable: false marks anything under 60 respondents, which is AHRQ's own publication floor;
• rows default to a minimum of 60 respondents — the same floor — so the default answer contains nothing AHRQ would decline to publish. Lower it with min_sample to see less-common drugs; those come back reliable: false.

Treat the numbers as rough magnitude and ranking, not as counts. Ranking the top few drugs for a common condition is what this data is good for. Precise totals, small subgroups and year-over-year differences of a few percent are not.

Two things that would otherwise mislead

Fewer than half of prescriptions carry a condition. 47.5% of fills in 2024 are linked to any diagnosis; the rest are not attributed to one. So a condition total is a subset of prescribing, not a census of it, and an empty result can mean "not captured" rather than "not prescribed". Every response states the year's actual coverage rather than implying completeness.

One fill can be linked to several conditions. That is correct for "is this drug used for this condition" and wrong for money: the condition tables carry no expenditure at all, because summing spend across conditions would invent national spending that was never spent. Money lives only in meps_drug_use and meps_top_drugs, where each fill is counted once.

Some "drugs" are therapeutic classes. MEPS substitutes a class name for the product where naming it would identify a respondent — INTERLEUKIN INHIBITORS, ANTINEOPLASTICS, ANTIDIABETIC AGENTS. In 2024 that is 49 of 554 names, but those 49 carry 31.9% of all recorded spending, so a ranking by cost is dominated by classes rather than products. meps_drug_use and meps_top_drugs say so in every response. A plural or category-sounding name is a class.

Data sources

• MEPS public use files, three per year, from https://meps.ahrq.gov/data_files/pufs/ — Prescribed Medicines, the Appendix to Event Files (the condition link), and Medical Conditions. Free, no credential. The file numbers per year come from AHRQ's own index at https://meps.ahrq.gov/data_files/search_pufs.json; they are not derivable (2024 is HC-254A / HC-254I / HC-255), so they are looked up, never guessed.
• Condition category labels from the HCUP CCSR reference file, https://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/toolssoftware/ccsr/dxccsr.jsp.

Years 2019 onward. Earlier files code conditions with CCS rather than CCSR and are not comparable.

.github/workflows/meps-refresh.yml checks AHRQ's index on the 3rd of each month and loads any year that has all three files and is not already held. AHRQ publishes a year roughly annually without pre-announcing it, so the check does nothing 11 months out of 12 — that is cheaper than noticing a release late.

MEPStrends is not the source. AHRQ's own pre-computed estimates at meps.ahrq.gov/mepstrends/ sit behind HTTP Basic auth (WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Secured Data Tools"), so the estimates here are computed from the public files rather than read from theirs.

Quick Start

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

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/meps/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 1683+ 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/meps_drugs_for_condition \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"condition":"depression"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/meps_drugs_for_condition. 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": {
    "meps": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-meps"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-meps

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 Meps data" })

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

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT