European associations NVC Netherlands Packaging Centre and HCPC Europe have released an interesting position paper that calls for more marketing research on the potential role of packaging in improving patient adherence.
A few highlights…
The last point of contact between the patient and the health care providers is not the
dispensing pharmacist but the pharmaceutical packaging. The packaging can represent
a huge barrier when the patient/consumer arrives home and opens it, but at the same
time packaging may significantly contribute to the improvement of patient adherence in
medicine, for instance through communication and the use of intelligent packaging.
Concordance is the base for compliance, adherence and persistence. It is therefore
essential that patients get positive information about their treatment to achieve the
level of understanding of their condition which leads to concordance. This information
can be provided by a number of means, packaging being one of them.
A number of success factors for using packaging have been identified to improve patient
adherence.
- Take point-of-consumption as starting point for packaging design.
- Apply available and possible newly developed communicative and behavioral
insights into packaging.
- Use packaging to facilitate and stimulate positive feedback loops between patient
and health care providers.
The paper suggests necessary actions from various players:
• The pharmaceutical industry should direct basic research funding to innovative packaging concepts.
• Packaging designers and suppliers must develop and adapt technologies used in other packaging areas (such as consumer packaging) to benefit health care packaging.
• Health care (co)financing organizations should investigate and discover clear cost-benefit analyses of improving packaging and governmental organizations should facilitate experiments to test actually doing so.