Approximately 75.1% of all medical visits result in the administration of some type of drug therapy. Within the past 30 days, a survey showed that 48.5% of people in the United States have taken a minimum of one prescription drug.
In 2010 alone, doctors either ordered or provided 285.1 million prescription drugs while seeing patients during outpatient hospital visits. During or after these visits, doctors, as well as pharmacies, ordered and/or provided 2.6 billion prescription drugs.
Given the prevailing need for drug therapy, as well as other types of prescription drugs, it is essential to have safe, tamper-resistant, and clinical labelling on product packages. Plastic blister packaging is one type of popular solution for packaging medical supplies and pharmaceuticals.
One of the main features of a blister package is its cavity, or pocket. This pocket is made by a formable web, and is intended to prevent the products, such as syringes and pharmaceutical drugs, from being damaged. Blister packaging is used most often in the United States to contain pharmaceuticals that come in unit doses.
There are several different types of blister packaging service options available. These options will, of course, depend on the types of products being enclosed. Some packages are laminated and easy to peel open, while others may include additional layers in order to prevent product tampering and damage during shipping and storage.
Blister packaging can be customized to meet specific product safety and tracking requirements. Packages can, for example, be color coded as well as come in different styles and types of containers.
Other popular packaging choices include vinyl, which can come in a variety of appearances for ease of identification and storage:
- Opaque
- Tinted
- Translucent
Pharmaceutical and medical packaging companies can also provide printing and labeling services. These labels are important for identification, quality control, and other purposes:
- Lot number
- Expiration date
- Bar codes
- Product information
- Product coupons
One of the benefits of carded blister packaging is that product information, advertisements, and coupons can be included. In addition to containing important product information, this packaging method is also popular because it can include vial labels and instructions.
Some products are required to have customized packaging by special pharmaceutical companies. These include products such as auto-injector pens and sterilized bottles containing fluid medicine.
Another important feature of blister packaging is that some medicine and pharmaceutical packaging can be produced with child-safety features. In this way, only an adult will be able to open these packages so that children aren’t able to access the contents.
During clinical trials, clinical labelling services are an important option to differentiate between placebos and the actual drug being tested. Furthermore, clinical labelling also assists with the pharmaceutical track and trace process, It is essential to have unique codes for product identification purposes in many medical and pharmaceutical scenarios.