February 17, 2011
During his TEDMED talk in 2010, Thomas Goetz, editor of Wired magazine, called prescription drug labeling, one of the most cynical exercises in medicine. He was of course referring to the cipher of information that accompanies pill bottles and drug advertisements at its best it’s overwhelming, at its worst it’s impenetrable.
It s estimated that the U.S. loses $240 billion annually on non-adherence to medication instructions, and while this is certainly not entirely attributable to the way drugs are packaged, one has to wonder if there aren’t some obvious ways to cut down on inadvertent misuse. If medical information were easier to understand, would more patients follow clinician instructions? Would we in turn see better treatment outcomes?
With this idea in mind, Pharmacopeia the NGO tasked with setting standards for prescription and over-the-counter medications has issued some new guidelines for drug makers to consider when packaging their medications. Some are straightforward textual changes i.e. take 2 pills twice daily becomes take 2 tablets in the morning and 2 tablets in the evening. And some delve more deeply into design and packaging, addressing font size, treatment of auxiliary information, and other elements to make instructions readable and to make sure the priority information (dose, side effects, efficacy, etc.) actually looks like the most important information on the label.
Pharmacopeia isn’t the only group calling for new drug packaging standards. Also forging the path in drug information redesign is a group of researchers at Dartmouth’s Center for Medicine. Taking inspiration from Cocoa KrispiesTM packaging, they’ve boiled down the essentials of a drug information sheet into an easily understandable one-pager reminiscent of a cereal box. (You can take a look at their sample label for the sleep aid Lunesta, here)
Goetz himself, inspired by the work of the Dartmouth team, commissioned his Wired designers to apply their expertise to another of medicine s most puzzling patient forms blood test results. The transformed documents are remarkable–colorful, easy-to-read and comprehend, and personalized with levels of risk and suggested behavior changes. As Goetz points, out, ultimately it s not about scaring the patient into making positive behavior change, so much as it s about empowering him/her to make better choices. Making sure patients can understand and apply test results is an obvious and important first step. And Goetz notes that the whole redesign was accomplished with less than $10,000.
Needless to say, insights about the way health information is presented and communicated apply far beyond the U.S. context, and need not only apply at the level of the patient. Health care providers and health policy makers may benefit equally. Could clearer packaging and instructions accompanying rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for malaria improve adherence to results and treatment outcomes? Could personalized feedback forms regarding physician prescribing cut down on antibiotic misuse? Could graphic representations of antibiotic resistance trends motivate policy makers to pursue more strident antibiotic stewardship measures?
A new emphasis on data communication is emerging, in part because of technological advances in data collection, surveillance, and visualization technology. But health information is still lagging behind. In world where we can track and visualize, in real-time, the density of tweets in the city of New York, why can’t we communicate the information that is most relevant to our health? With some intriguing design templates now on the table, let s hope the inertia is short-lived from here.
Image credit: Flickr: rbatina
