The Effects of Stamping or Printing on Tablet or Capsule Readability / 医薬品情報学

ABSTRACT

Background: With the marked changes occurring in the medical field, such as rapid population aging, the frequency of one‐dose package use by medication‐dispensing services is increasing.　Pharmaceutical companies promote the development of pharmaceutical products that can be identified based on their color, size, and imprinted information to reduce one‐dose packaging errors and difficulties in tablet identification.　However, there have not been any studies about the effectiveness of such measures for aiding the identification of tablets in the clinical setting.　Therefore, we examined the effects of imprinting on the ease of identification of tablets and capsules.Methods: The study was conducted over a 3‐month period and involved 39 pharmacists aged under 40.　The times they needed to transcribe the characters imprinted on each tablet/capsule were measured.Results: The time needed to identify a tablet was significantly shortened by kana printing (p<0.01), whereas more time was required to identify a capsule when the text color was similar to that of the capsule.　The observed transcription errors included ‘inaccurately transcribing alphanumeric characters' and ‘omitting units or other information.'Discussion: These results suggest that kana printing is effective at increasing the ease of tablet/capsule identification, which is also affected by the color of the printed text.