There is a need to add basic characteristics to medicinal products, examples being "sugar free", "parallel import", "modified release".

There is already an attribute for productClassification but that is for adding external high level codings such ATC codes. A classification is not quite the same as a characteristic.

It is possible to use the characteristics of a package item but there will be cases where that is overkill (and too specific) and just a basic high level flag is used.

This proposes:

MedicinalProductDefinition.characteristic: CodeableConcept [0..*]