Catalent's Patient Adherence Packaging Design Honored for Thinking Beyond the Pill

The Healthcare Compliance Packaging Council (HCPC) awarded Catalent Pharma Solutions its 2010 Innovative Design of the Year Award for Catalent's DELPOUCH Starter Kit.

The design was recognized for providing a unique packaging solution that may help to enhance a patient's experience and to promote adherence to a regimen of topical treatments.

“We are proud and honored to be recognized by the HCPC for our design excellence,” said Barry Russell, President of Catalent's Medication Delivery Solutions business unit. “The award comes on the heels of Catalent's recent study that documents how adherence packaging has a significant impact on patient persistency. At Catalent, we believe patient adherence packages that contain the right mix of tailored features can improve a patient's engagement and experience with his or her medicine, ultimately helping to improve a patient's medication adherence.”

Catalent's proprietary design exemplifies this position, and was designed from the ground up to contain several features that improve a patient's experience. Among these features is the unit dose topical treatment design of the DELPOUCH® package itself. This unique delivery vehicle delivers the right amount of treatment to an affected area in a safe and convenient manner. The package also features Catalent's Media Enhanced Packaging™ technology which offers a patient a gateway to specific, product-centered content via the internet, a smart phone application and an embedded watermark built right into the package. Brands can leverage this technology to deliver product-specific content, video instructions in multiple languages or even special offers, all without consuming valuable packaging real estate. Finally, the design includes several passive engagement devices which can be used to enhance a patient's experience. These range from the way the package itself is constructed to provide reminder prompting through day/night graphics and printing of the days of the week, to increased billboard space that allows physicians to provide notes or additional educational information that can empower a patient to manage their own medication regimen.

“Too often we equate medication non-adherence to just forgetting to take our pills, but that is not the case. Medication non-adherence affects all different types of medication and there are a multitude of different factors that can influence it,” said Bill Hartzel, Catalent's Product Manager for Adherence Solutions. “Our approach is to evaluate the entire product from the dose format to the route of administration to the packaging, and our award-winning DELPOUCH® Starter Kit is just one example of how Catalent can design a unique and tailored solution to meet the needs of a brand.”

To schedule a follow-on interview with Bill Hartzel, please contact Patricia McGee at [email protected].
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