Accelerating Impact Through Strategic, Data-Driven Comparisons
In today’s competitive pharmaceutical landscape, even the most thoughtfully designed patient support programs can fall short if they’re not delivering industry-leading patient experiences. Internal KPIs offer a narrow view that may overlook critical opportunities to improve access, accelerate time to therapy, and reduce abandonment.
Comparative insights are essential because the barriers patients face are often invisible without a relative lens. Consider these market realities:
- References ¹ ² ³ listed at bottom of page
These variations are not accidental—they stem from meaningful differences in program design, service quality, operational execution, and cost. Understanding where your program falls on that spectrum is key to unlocking better outcomes.
Benchmarking enables manufacturers to:
- Identify which operational or experience gaps are driving patient drop-off
- Learn how best-in-class programs reduce friction and streamline the journey to therapy
- Identify the services that make the most impact to patient access and experience
- Improve fills and adherence by removing delays, confusion, and handoff failures
When done right, benchmarking doesn’t just reveal how you compare; it shows where and how to improve. Herspiegel’s benchmarking solution helps translate those insights into action, aligning teams around measurable priorities and empowering change that improves fills, adherence, and ultimately, patient lives.
Industry Benchmarking Framework
Our benchmarking spans the entire patient services ecosystem, including program design, channel execution, and financial investment. The industry benchmark framework is designed to be flexible, enabling tailored assessments while grounded in standard comparators across three core domains:
1. Patient Experience Benchmarking
We leverage our proprietary specialty pharmacy (SP) relationships to gain insight into competitive operational metrics and performance. We use KPIs to measure referral, initiation, and retention to assess the full patient journey. Metrics typically include, but are not limited to, referral evaluation, prior authorization (PA) turnaround and appeals, triage to SP, fill rate, abandonment, and persistency.
Our comparative lens is built around analog use cases across a broad therapeutic spectrum, with flexibility to target disease-specific nuances.
Outcome: Using our structured analog benchmarking scorecard, we uncover access barriers and experience gaps that hinder initiation or adherence, revealing process delays and guiding improvements to accelerate therapy and ensure care continuity.
2. Hub and Specialty Pharmacy Operational Benchmarking
We benchmark the operational infrastructure of patient services programs by assessing HUB and specialty pharmacy responsibilities, staffing structure, call/outreach cadence, processing times, and adherence to service expectations. Evaluations include internal and external roles, standard operating procedure (SOP) and business rules document (BRD) alignment, field coordination, and the technology systems that support execution.
Benchmarks are anchored in best practices across therapeutic areas, including product-specific service models and workflows where applicable, and validated through proprietary data and expert interviews.
Outcome: Illuminate breakdowns in execution, clarify roles and handoffs across HUB and SP partners, assess service and performance consistency, and identify opportunities to streamline processes and scale operations effectively.
3. Financial Benchmarking
We benchmark the investment side of patient support programs, analyzing total program spend, cost per role, spend per patient, and resource allocation across specific therapeutic areas. Our evaluation includes internal and external hub operational costs, field-team support models, and investment levels by service channel. Therapeutic area needs, program maturity, and delivery model design contextualize this analysis.
Insights are grounded in current market expectations and validated through blinded program spending, industry interviews, and our proprietary knowledge base. This allows for a tailored understanding of where financial strategy aligns or misaligns with program performance and patient impact.
Outcome: Understand how spending compares to competitors and identify where the budget and impact are misaligned. Inform more innovative resourcing and more efficient investment decisions.
Benchmarking Research Approach
We apply a proven, flexible process, integrating quantitative benchmarking with qualitative insight and strategic alignment.
Phase 1: External Experience KPI Benchmarking
We benchmark patient experience KPIs across onboarding, access, and adherence, aligning on relevant analogs and defining key metrics across therapeutic areas.
Phase 2: Hub Operation and Financial Benchmarking Research
We evaluate HUB/SP execution, financial investment, turn around time (TAT), and service offerings. This is supported by secondary research with Herspiegel’s insight overlay, primary research from expert interviews, and operational analysis to identify performance patterns and capability gaps. We built a competitive benchmark report to support the findings.
Phase 3: Development, Testing, and Recommendations
We synthesize insights into strategic recommendations, validated through stakeholder input and our recruitment network to align with business goals and patient impact. This is developed through internal interviews, situational analysis, and deliverables often including capability assessments, roadmaps, and executive presentations to guide investment and transformation.
Value For Your Team
This solution equips teams with the insights needed to move beyond internal metrics and clearly understand their market position. It enables data-driven decision-making to identify optimization opportunities, strengthens the business case for investment, redesign, or scale, and fosters alignment across leadership around performance objectives and patient impact.
Looking for expert support to benchmark your program?
1.CoverMyMeds LLC. Medication Access Report. 2020. https://www.covermymeds.com/main/medication-access-report/
2. PubMedCentral
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10388011/#sec12
3. BrightInsights,
