Patient Adherence In Healthcare

Medication adherence is often treated as an information or reminder problem. But for many patients, the issue is the relationship they have with their condition and treatment. Research shows that it subjects how a patient thinks and feels about their medication. Our bet is that you can change that relationship through the physical experience of the medication itself. That's the idea behind medication adherence packaging.

Reminder Solve Part Of The Problem

A notification can prompt a patient to take their medication. It can't change how they feel about taking it. Startups have tried to solve adherence for years with smart caps, pill sorters, and text nudges. Healthcare has already spent considerable effort on education, reminders, monitoring and simplification. But medication adherence rates stayed low, because those tools treat adherence mainly as a memory problem. 

Our hypothesis is that adherence partly follows salience. Patient adherence tracks how present a condition feels in a patient's daily life and not entirely by the willpower they have. Cancer treatment from cancer patients has near-perfect adherence from 76% to 90%; while research on hypertension treatment consistently finds that only about half of patients are still taking their medication as prescribed a year after starting it, even though high blood pressure is one of the most dangerous conditions to leave untreated. 

This suggests that adherence is downstream of how a patient relates to their condition and their treatment. Our hypothesis is that medication adherence packaging can influence that relationship by making the treatment experience feel calmer, more considered, and more inviting than the amber pill bottle.

Learn From The Supplement Industry

Take a case with no disease at all. Millions of people take a daily vitamin, magnesium, or fish oil, most without a prescriber or a follow-up appointment. They stick with it anyway. They post about it, tell their friends, and build a routine around it.

Supplements are packaged, branded and merchandised as an act of self-investment. Prescription medication, despite carrying much higher clinical stakes, often reaches the patient in an experience designed primarily around dispensing of amber plastic pills and regulation. Both are a daily act, but the relationship a patient has with each one is the opposite.

Our approach

We take the self care industry's playbook and apply it to prescribed medications. We are making pharmacy compliance packaging a patient wants to pick up, not packaging they would rather keep out of sight.

The Tully Tube is a medication adherence packaging designed the way a supplement brand would design it, if the product happened to require a prescription. Packaging won't solve every cause of non-adherence but it addresses an overlooked part of the problem, the emotional and behavioral experience patients have every time they encounter their medication. 

We're also launching a QR page soon. It's designed to build a relationship with the packaging, not just deliver a prompt. The goal is to change how a patient feels about the pill they're being reminded to take, and to make them feel cared for.

Patient’s Engagement on Packaging

We see evidence that patients are already engaging with thoughtful packaging design. Patients are voluntarily scanning QR codes at the bottom of the Tully Tube without being prompted. This gives us a measurable signal that patients are interacting with the experience of medication packaging. 

If medication packaging can invite interaction rather than simply contain a prescription, it may become one more way to strengthen the patient’s relationship with their treatment.

Curious what medication packaging looks like in practice? Learn more about the Tully Tube.