Get the Right Pharmaceutical Packaging with These 6 Tips

Doctors in the United States write a lot of prescriptions. In 2010, 2.6 billion prescription drugs were ordered by doctors and pharmacists. Whether your product requires bottle filling or you are looking for blister packaging designs, getting the right pharmaceutical and medical packaging design is an important part of making your product a success. Here are some tips to help you get it right:

1. Try to look at your medical packaging materials as if you have never seen them before. Would you understand how the medication should be taken if you could not read the instructions? It is important to do what you can to make sure the person who will take the medication is able to look at your packaging and figure out how to take the first dose. Often the instructions are listed on the bottom of the packaging and this makes sense in some ways. That is often where there is some space but it may be overlooked by the people who are taking the medication. If you are interested in creating patient adherence packages, you need to think through the ease with which people will use your product packaging.
2. Explain patient adherence packaging to your consumer. This kind of packaging is preferred by many medical professionals because it helps their patients heed their medical advice. This kind of packaging works with bottle filling packaging and blister pack packaging. The packaging has features that can help patients keep to the schedule that is recommended by their doctor for taking their prescriptions and it can help them see when they have and have not taken their dose for the day. When you explain to the consumer why the packaging is created a certain way, they will be more likely to use it the way it was designed to be used. That will make for better adherence to their doctor’s instructions and will lead to healthier.
3. Be careful with the way you word your instructions. Experts in healthcare recommend keeping the instructions on medical packaging to no more than a sixth grade reading level. This is because it needs to be understood by such a large percentage of the United States general population. Whether you are packaging a product that needs bottle filling or is in medication blister packaging, if the people who need your product cannot understand how to take it, they will skip it. The more basic you can make the instructions you put on your product, the better.
4. White space is your friend. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a lot of rules and regulations regarding what information is included on pharmaceutical packaging so it is sometimes hard to work white space into pharmaceutical packaging designs but if you are able to use it, you can make your instructions more effective and useful for the consumers who are going to use the product. There are products for which illustrations are more important that the words that accompany them.
5. Put your instructions in an order that makes sense. This may seem like a given but there are a number of pharmaceutical products that have instructions that go along with them that are not placed in an order that makes sense to the patients taking the product. If there are special instructions for mixing or titrating the product, they need to be placed in the right spot on the packaging. It can be confusing for consumers if the special instructions are placed just anywhere that there is space on the packaging.
6. Make sure any illustrations match your wording. Illustrations can be helpful to explaining how to use a product that needs bottle filling or is on a blister pack but you need to make sure the wording and the pictures work together. When you look at the illustrations on your packaging, try to think about how people can get different ideas from what you are trying to convey when they look at your imagery. When you do this, you can help your consumers.

Getting pharmaceutical packaging right makes a difference for a number of reasons. It can increase patient adherence to medical instructions and make it easier for consumers to use your product.