How One Life Sciences Company Transformed Benefit Verification in 6 Weeks

72 hours. That’s the standard turnaround time for benefit verification for many patient access teams, based on Surescripts market research. It’s days patients spend waiting to find out whether their medication is covered—medications they critically need—and at what cost.

The scene is familiar across life sciences companies: patient access teams spending hours chasing pharmacy benefit information through phone calls, fax machines and payer portals. Meanwhile, patients wait days, even weeks, for their medications.

It doesn’t have to be like this. With Surescripts Electronic Benefit Verification, it isn’t.

One large life sciences company—a top 10 global pharmaceutical manufacturer with multiple specialty and chronic-care brands—got Electronic Benefit Verification up and running in six weeks.

Here’s how they did it. With the right approach, it was faster than expected.

1. Choose a Well-Connected Partner

Surescripts Electronic Benefit Verification is powered by the nation’s most connected health intelligence network, making it easy to verify pharmacy benefit coverage and out-of-pocket costs—without faxes, phone calls or analyzing past claims—and all within seconds.

In fact, it takes less than three seconds on average to verify benefits when all criteria are met.

With a streamlined method of getting accurate benefit information directly from pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) across the nation, Surescripts Electronic Benefit Verification returns patient- and medication-specific benefit information securely and within existing workflows, built on partnership depth and a network of 30.5 billion transactions.

2. Start with the Portal

Teams can start with the portal to quickly reap the benefits of Surescripts Electronic Benefit Verification. And it takes minimal training to get these teams started.

In this case, the pharmaceutical manufacturer took a phased approach, starting with Surescripts’ Electronic Benefit Verification portal, a lower-lift entry point that had patient access teams verifying benefits much sooner, without making them wait for a long and involved technical build.

3. Collaborate Across the Ecosystem

Implementation isn’t a solo effort.

The pharmaceutical manufacturer worked closely with their patient access vendor and the Surescripts team to align on data flows, validate outputs, and ensure the solution fit within the vendor’s existing systems.

It was an example of three-way collaboration among the manufacturer, vendor and Surescripts, each bringing complementary strengths the other couldn’t: therapeutic and program knowledge from the pharmaceutical manufacturer, operational infrastructure from the vendor, and robust connectivity and ongoing partnership from Surescripts.

4. Validate the Results

Surescripts Electronic Benefit Verification speeds up turnaround time from 72-hours to under 3 seconds on average—roughly 300 times faster, according to Surescripts market research. It’s the difference between a patient hearing back the same day and waiting until next week.

For the pharmaceutical manufacturer’s patient access teams, the scale of Electronic Benefit Verification translated to an estimated 370 hours saved per week by reducing manual calls and faxes to PBMs.

5. Take Benefit Verification to Scale

The pharmaceutical manufacturer saw measurable gains in only six weeks.

What makes the difference in cases like these isn’t just implementation speed, but also the reach. With connectivity spanning virtually all major PBMs nationwide, Surescripts Electronic Benefit Verification gives patient access teams a direct line to the information they need, without the patchwork of phone calls and workarounds.

Network scale turns benefit verification from a fragmented, manual process into a consistent, reliable workflow.