This week, I’m rerunning some popular posts while I attend Asembia’s 2017 Specialty Pharmacy Summit. Click here to see the original post and comments from December 2016.
Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are facing unprecedented criticism about their business practices and levels of transparency. Which got me wondering: What do plan sponsors—the PBMs’ customers—think about their PBMs?
For the answer, I turned to Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute (PBMI) 2016 Pharmacy Benefit Manager Customer Satisfaction Report (available for purchase.) It rates 11 PBMs based on feedback from more than 500 plan sponsor customers.
The data show a strong association between a PBM’s perceived transparency and a plan sponsor’s satisfaction. As you will see in the charts below, plan sponsors are more satisfied with PBMs that are more transparent.
Yet the causality of this relationship isn’t entirely clear. Smaller plan sponsors tend to work with smaller PBMs, which are rated more highly on transparency and alignment of goals. Are more transparent PBMs truly better? Or, are we observing a selection effect, whereby plan sponsors with fewer internal resources choose PBMs with different business and profit models? And if PBM transparency is so wonderful, why don’t all plan sponsors insist on it?
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