How to Measure the Success of Your Specialty Pharmacy: A Benchmarking & Staffing Guide

Building a specialty pharmacy is a significant undertaking for any health system, but standing up the program is only the beginning. Once it’s operational, the next question is inevitable: how do you know it’s working?

Health system leaders regularly ask us how their specialty pharmacy stacks up against the competition, and whether their staffing model is actually delivering results. Both questions matter, because the answers shape how a program grows from here. Let’s break down the external benchmarks worth tracking and a proven framework for evaluating your staffing model from the inside out.

Where You Stand: Specialty Pharmacy Benchmarking Data

External benchmarks give you a reality check. URAC’s most recent Specialty Pharmacy Performance Report, covering 2024 measurement-year data, evaluated 465 accredited pharmacies nationwide that collectively dispensed more than 58 million specialty prescriptions. The results offer a useful yardstick for your own operation.

Specialty Pharmacy Turnaround Time:

• New prescriptions: 9.00 days
• Refill prescriptions: 3.01 days

Care Quality & Accessibility:

• Dispensing accuracy: 99.99% of prescriptions dispensed error-free
• Distribution accuracy: 99.91% of prescriptions dispensed error-free
• Calls answered within 30 seconds: 83.15%
• Call abandonment rate: 2.98%
• Consumer satisfaction: 96.31%, based largely on internally developed surveys
• Clinical intervention acceptance rate: 74.95%

If your program is falling short in any of these areas, that’s a signal, not a verdict. It points you toward where to focus next.

Evaluating Your Specialty Pharmacy Staffing Model

No two specialty pharmacies look alike, and no two staffing models should either. What works depends on your health system’s size, patient population, and service mix. Getting there usually takes some trial and error.

Still, there’s a consistent methodology for evaluating whether your staffing model is pulling its weight. It starts with the right specialty pharmacy staffing benchmarks.

An ASHP whitepaper lays out the approach across four functional areas. For each area, ASHP identifies a core metric (how many times a task is completed) and a set of context metrics (the specific tasks behind that number), together forming the specialty pharmacy KPIs worth tracking.

• Pharmacy operations—Core metric: Specialty Rx per FTE Context metrics: Rx processed per FTE, Rx fulfilled per FTE, Rx verifications per FTE, shipments generated per FTE, calls handled per FTE
• Clinical consults—Core metric: Clinical consults per FTE Context metrics: Initial education per FTE, clinical reassessments per FTE, clinical interventions per FTE, other clinical activities.
• Prior authorizations—Core metric: PA per FTE Context metrics: New PA per FTE, renewal PA per FTE, appeals per FTE.
• Medication assistance—Applications per FTE Context metrics: New applications per FTE, renewal applications per FTE, patients per FTE, savings obtained per FTE.

Medication assistance programs are worth calling out specifically. They’re critical to patient care, but they don’t always show up in dispense volume, so they’re easy to under-measure if you’re only looking at fulfillment numbers.

Measurement is an Ongoing Strategy

Combining external benchmarks with internal staffing metrics gives you a full picture of where your program is strong, where it’s exposed, and where your staffing model needs to flex. If you’re ready to build a measurement strategy for your program, we can help. Our clients have seen as much as a 10:1 return through our partnership. Get in touch with our team today!