April 2, 2024 | Design systems, compliance, design system, pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical regulations, regulatory
The strict compliance guidelines that exist within pharma can mean that digital content and platforms can take a long time to be approved and involve lots of back and forth throughout the design and development process.
Design systems provide a solution to this, creating a standardised approach and a more streamlined approval process. Here, we explore some of the common challenges and how these can be overcome.

Regulatory boards within the pharmaceutical sector ensure the safe promotion and use of drugs across a range of markets. This can mean, however, that approval processes are often lengthy and complex.
Digital content that contains promotional material follows similar strict regulations, navigating the balance between a great user experience, whilst remaining compliant. Design systems provide a solution to this, creating a standardised approach for the structure of platforms and presentation of content — leading to a more streamlined approval process.
Here, we explore the common challenges pharma companies face when designing compliant digital products, and how design systems are changing the game when it comes to the approval process.
The pharma sector is heavily regulated — and for good reason. It wasn’t always this way, and throughout the 1900s there are countless examples where regulation has failed and pharma organisations, as well as patients, have seen the consequences.
Design systems are a powerful tool when streamlining the regulatory process, offering a number of benefits.
Using a design system provides consistent building blocks, allowing pharma teams to enforce standardised design guidelines and best practices. By maintaining a uniform visual through the use of standardised components and page layouts, a design system ensures that approval processes are more predictable and less time-saving. When submitting a new page for approval, the structure and components of that page are already going to be familiar to regulatory colleagues. Therefore, they won’t need to worry about things such as placement and layouts, and can instead just focus on the actual content and wording.
This content was provided by Graphite Digital