Can Custom Packaging Trends Help Revolutionize Healthcare?
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
Medical packaging has tended to be functional, set in its ways, and not that exciting. It was mainly there to protect the contents and perhaps carry a brand message. But big changes are looming in healthcare. Could custom packaging be one of the trends that enables those changes to happen?
What will never change is that patient safety comes first. The most important job for medical packaging is to preserve and protect the contents so that they’re safe and effective to use. Packaging for over-the-counter drugs also plays an essential role in branding. It has to command shelf space with familiar and trusted imagery and messaging.
But there’s also plenty of change going on. These changes affect packaging trends, how we buy medication, and innovations within the healthcare sector.
The growth of online selling, new materials and technology, and changes to how medications are prescribed will all have an impact. There’s also the need to make packaging more sustainable. These changes bring opportunities for innovative packaging providers.
Like almost every other sector of the economy, healthcare experienced an accelerated period of change during the Covid pandemic. Telemedicine rapidly went from an interesting idea for the future to an everyday necessity. This trend is certain to continue.
Self-testing and home diagnostics are also increasingly common using swabs and devices such as pulse oximeters. To produce accurate results self-diagnostics have to be done properly. How could packaging trends help with the job of delivering foolproof instructions?
This is just one example of how packaging can move from the world of functional containers to being an enabling technology and a key part of the value chain. Many of these trends will also affect the packaging for cosmetics, skin care and alternative therapy products.
Ageing Populations
Throughout the EU the percentage of the population aged 85 or older is expected to increase from 5.9% to 14.6% between 2020 and 2100. Ageing populations have more complex health needs. There will be millions more people with intricate individual medication regimes involving different drugs, doses and intervals.
Safe administration of medications is one of the biggest issues for the elderly care sector - particularly for people who want to be cared for in their own home. Innovations in packaging and printing technology that produce custom packaging could be part of the answer.
Because of the ageing population, medical packaging will have to avoid fiddly, hard-to-open packs. And six-point text may help you get a lot of information onto a small box or leaflet - but it’s not much help if (like an increasing number of us) you have failing eyesight.
Personalised Medicine
In the coming years we’ll hear a lot more about personalised medicine. This will gradually move us away from generalised prescribing of medication. Instead there’ll be a system based on a deeper understanding of how diseases and treatments react with individuals based on genetic profiling, medical imaging data and lifestyle.
Therapeutic regimes and drug dosages will be specifically designed for individuals and targeted groups of people. Pharmaceutical companies will produce smaller batch sizes to meet these specific needs. And custom packaging solutions for medications will play an important role in supporting this migration.
Remote and highly-personalised healthcare should be more convenient and more effective. It could also reduce the pressure on health and care services that would otherwise grow as populations get older.
But this will also mean people will have to self-manage sometimes complex medication administration. Innovative packaging providers have a great opportunity to develop solutions that will help this new approach work. Personalised packaging will be essential to support more personalised healthcare.
Incorporating NFC chips and personalised QR codes into packaging could also help link to internet resources. These could provide more detailed information about the medication and potential side-effects and help to monitor that medications are taken at the right time.
Online Buying
Over-the-counter medicines are increasingly, but not exclusively, bought online (perhaps we’ll have to start calling them over-the courier?). So there are two different packaging challenges. Online sales want smaller, lighter and highly robust packaging - while packages designed for shops need to stand out with instantly recognisable branding to win the attention and shelf space battle.
It’s easy to see how products will be increasingly packaged to suit different routes to market. This is another area where innovative providers can meet the need through custom packaging.
Innovation in medical packaging could be one of the most significant packaging trends in the next few years. This is a great opportunity for forward-thinking packaging companies.