Actions speak louder than words

Since we started RedCap, we’ve been living in the medication-adherence literature—and there’s no shortage of it. For decades, clinicians and policymakers have made the same point: if we could move adherence, the population-level health impact could outweigh many incremental improvements in drug therapy.

And yet, despite an explosion of research, the day-to-day reality of taking meds has barely changed. Most prescriptions still leave the pharmacy in the same plastic bottle format that became standard in the early 1970s. Fewer than ~5% of U.S. prescriptions use any meaningful form of reminder packaging.

A lot of adherence research aims to “convert” nonadherent patients into adherent ones. That’s a steep hill: persistence drops over time, and many interventions add friction—log this, reply to that, click here, enroll there, change your routine.

A simpler, more effective frame: set patients up to win from day one. Teaching a puppy is easier than retraining an old dog. The first period of a regimen are when habits get wired—and packaging is the one tool patients interact with every single day. If the bottle makes the right action obvious, adherence becomes easier. If it doesn’t, patients are forced to rely on memory and willpower—two things real life constantly disrupts.

And the evidence is pretty clear: packaging-based interventions can improve adherence, largely because they reduce forgetfulness and make the “right next step” obvious in the moment.

So why hasn’t anything changed?

If the evidence exists, why are we still stuck with the same bottle?

Because most reminder packaging historically meant a different dispensing system—especially blister packs and time-of-dose formats. They can work, but they often don’t fit the modern pharmacy supply chain:

• High-speed automation and fill lines are optimized for industry-standard bottles.

• Blister formats can demand new equipment, workflows, QA, training, and inventory—high switching costs.

• So reminder packaging stays niche, even when it helps patients.

In short: the science moved forward; the packaging infrastructure didn’t.

RedCap is built to remove the barrier that trapped reminder packaging for decades: it turns the standard bottle into reminder packaging—without asking pharmacies to rebuild how they dispense. It fits existing bottles, existing fill lines, and existing suppliers—so there’s no “parallel system” penalty.

We don’t need another adherence program that asks patients to do more. We need the default bottle—used billions of times a year—to finally do its job and help patients succeed.