Making packaging safer and more user friendly
By: Laura Bix, Alyssa Harben, and Mark Becker
The world is burdened with healthcare issues that are costly both in financial and human terms. Major
problems in healthcare include: medication errors, patient non-adherence/non-compliance, infections
acquired within the hospital, and the unintentional poisoning of children due to unsupervised ingestion of medications or household chemicals. Packaging is not an obvious path to limiting the effects of these issues, and very few people in the world have purposefully and thoughtfully used it to do so. Our team attempts to quantify the interface between people and packaging to improve health outcomes.
This presentation will discuss some of the work we have done that attempts to: make labels easier to use; create child resistant closures that are a barrier for children (without being a hazard to adults); and ensure the sterility of devices used for surgical and emergency situations.
Laura Bix, PhD, is the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies for the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Interim Director for the School of
Packaging at Michigan State University. At MSU, she leads the Packaging HUB – which stands for Healthcare, Universal Design and Biomechanics. HUB researchers quantify the interface between people and packaging with the goal of improving health outcomes. They apply this approach to mitigate the impact of many problems in the healthcare system, including: medication errors; lack of patient adherence; the unintentional exposure of children to hazardous substances; and healthcare associated infections. During her time at MSU her efforts have been recognized with an Excellence in Teaching Award; a Phi Kappa Phi Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scholarship Award; an appointment as an
Academic Fellow in the CIC’s Academic Leadership Program and, more recently, selection as a HERS fellow.
She has served as an expert to international and national panels convened by ISO, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). She has been an invited panelist and featured speaker at workshops sponsored by National
Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine and the US Center for Quality, Innovation and Patient Safety (CQuIPS). Her interdisciplinary efforts regarding healthcare packaging and ease of use have also been recognized by industry, being named as one of the 100 most notable people in the medical device
industry by Medical Device and Diagnostics Magazine in 2008.
Work from her group has been published or highlighted in numerous outlets, including: PLoS One, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, Consumer Reports and Men’s Health.
