🩺 Medical MCP Server

Bring trusted medical data directly into your AI workflow. A local server for private, free access to FDA, WHO, PubMed, RxNorm, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar. No API keys. No data leaks.

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that brings authoritative medical information into AI coding environments like Cursor and Claude Desktop.

Why Use Medical MCP?

• 🔒 Your Data Never Leaves – Runs 100% locally; no tracking, no logs, no cloud
• 🆓 No API Keys – Works out of the box, zero configuration
• 🏥 Authoritative Sources – FDA, TGA, Health Canada, EMA, DailyMed, WHO, PubMed, Europe PMC, RxNorm, ClinicalTrials.gov
• ⚡ Easy Setup – One-click install in Cursor or simple manual setup
• 🔬 Comprehensive – Drug info, health stats, medical literature, clinical guidelines, pediatric sources
• 🛡️ Resilient – Circuit breakers, retry with backoff, rate limiting, and automatic fallbacks
• 📊 Evidence-Graded – Results tagged with study type and evidence level (Meta-Analysis → Case Report)
• 🏥 Health Monitoring – Built-in health check tool to diagnose source availability

What's New in v2.0

• Resilience Layer – Circuit breakers per source, retry with exponential backoff + jitter, per-source token bucket rate limiters
• Monid web search – Scholar, Cochrane, AAP, and PMC HTML go through Monid TinyFish (Tavily-style search/fetch). Semantic Scholar is the no-key fallback
• Evidence Grading – PubMed and multi-database results tagged with study type (Systematic Review, RCT, Cohort, Case Report, etc.) and evidence grade (I–V)
• Response Validation – Zod schemas validate all upstream API responses, logging warnings on schema drift without breaking
• NCBI API Key Support – Optional NCBI_API_KEY env var boosts PubMed from 3 req/sec to 10 req/sec
• Health Check Tool – health-check pings all upstream sources and reports latency, circuit breaker states, rate limiter status, and cache health
• Structured Logging – Leveled, structured logging (DEBUG/INFO/WARN/ERROR) with source tracking and timing for every API call
• Request Timeouts – All upstream calls have explicit response/deadline timeouts to prevent hanging

Quick Start

Install in Cursor (Recommended):

🔗 Install in Cursor

Or install manually:

npm install -g medical-mcp
# Or from source:
git clone https://github.com/JamesANZ/medical-mcp.git
cd medical-mcp && npm install && npm run build

Features

💊 Drug Information

• search-drugs – Search FDA, DailyMed, TGA (Australia), Health Canada, and EMA. Filter with countries (US, AU, CA, EU)
• get-drug-details – Get comprehensive US drug info by NDC code
• search-drug-nomenclature – Standardized drug names via RxNorm
• search-drug-safety – FDA FAERS adverse events, recalls, and shortages

📊 Health Statistics

• get-health-statistics – WHO Global Health Observatory data (life expectancy, mortality, disease prevalence)

🔬 Medical Literature

• search-medical-literature – Search 30M+ PubMed articles (with evidence grading)
• get-article-details – Detailed article info by PMID
• search-google-scholar – Academic papers via Monid TinyFish (research_paper) when MONID_API_KEY is set; otherwise Semantic Scholar
• search-medical-databases – Multi-database search (PubMed, Scholar, Semantic Scholar, Cochrane, ClinicalTrials.gov, Europe PMC)
• search-medical-journals – Top journals (NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Nature Medicine)

🏥 Clinical Tools

• search-clinical-guidelines – Practice recommendations from medical organizations
• search-clinical-trials – ClinicalTrials.gov plus Australia/New Zealand location coverage
• list-sources – Full catalog of registry adapters and dedicated-tool sources (WHO, PubMed, RxNorm, Scholar, Cochrane, AAP), including which MCP tool reaches each. This is not the search-drugs five-regulator fanout.

👶 Pediatric Sources

• search-pediatric-guidelines – AAP guidelines and Bright Futures preventive care
• search-pediatric-literature – Research from major pediatric journals
• get-child-health-statistics – Pediatric health indicators from WHO
• search-pediatric-drugs – Drugs with pediatric labeling and dosing information
• search-aap-guidelines – Comprehensive AAP guideline search (Bright Futures + Policy Statements)

🛡️ Reliability & Monitoring

• health-check – Ping all upstream sources, report latency/status, circuit breaker states, and cache health
• get-cache-stats – View cache statistics (hit rate, memory usage, entry count)

Installation

Cursor (One-Click)

Click the install link above or use:

cursor://anysphere.cursor-deeplink/mcp/install?name=medical-mcp&config=eyJtZWRpY2FsLW1jcCI6eyJjb21tYW5kIjoibnB4IiwiYXJncyI6WyIteSIsIm1lZGljYWwtbWNwIl19fQ==

Manual Installation

Requirements: Node.js 18+ and npm

git clone https://github.com/JamesANZ/medical-mcp.git
cd medical-mcp
npm install
npm run build
npm start

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "medical-mcp": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/medical-mcp/build/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "NCBI_API_KEY": "your_optional_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop after configuration.

Usage Examples

Search for Drug Information

{
  "tool": "search-drugs",
  "arguments": { "query": "Tylenol", "limit": 5 }
}

Search Medical Literature (with Evidence Grading)

Results now include evidence tags:

1. Efficacy of COVID-19 Treatments: A Meta-Analysis
   Evidence: [Systematic Review / Meta-Analysis • Grade I]
   Authors: Smith J, Jones K...

2. Randomized Trial of Remdesivir in Adults
   Evidence: [Randomized Controlled Trial • Grade II]
   Authors: Chen L, Wang M...

Run Health Check

{ "tool": "health-check", "arguments": {} }

Returns:

✅ FDA: healthy (234ms)
✅ PubMed: healthy (156ms)
✅ WHO: healthy (890ms)
✅ RxNorm: healthy (312ms)
✅ ClinicalTrials: healthy (445ms)
✅ SemanticScholar: healthy (189ms)

NCBI API Key: ✅ Configured (10 req/sec PubMed)

Architecture

Resilience Stack

Every API call flows through a three-layer resilience stack:

Request → Rate Limiter → Circuit Breaker → Retry (with backoff) → Upstream API

• Rate Limiter — Per-source token bucket prevents exceeding API limits (PubMed: 3/sec without key, 10/sec with; FDA: 4/sec; Google Scholar: 0.2/sec)
• Circuit Breaker — After 3 consecutive failures, the circuit opens for 60s, preventing cascade failures. Transitions: CLOSED → OPEN → HALF_OPEN → CLOSED
• Retry — Exponential backoff with full jitter on transient failures (429, 5xx, network errors). Max 2 retries

Evidence Grading

PubMed and multi-database results are automatically classified:

Automatic Fallback

When MONID_API_KEY is set, Scholar/Cochrane/AAP search and PMC HTML fetch go through Monid TinyFish. Without a key, Scholar falls back to Semantic Scholar's API — free, well-structured, 100 req/sec, no API key needed.

Response Validation

All upstream API responses are validated against Zod schemas. If a source changes their API response format, the server logs a warning but continues operating with raw data — no crashes, just alerts.

Data Sources