Performance Benchmarks For Health Plans

Sherlock Expense Evaluation Reports are the definitive benchmarks for health plan performance. They are critical tools to enhance operational performance and support strategic initiatives ranging from management of the product portfolio, vendor negotiations, outsourcing and business combinations.

Now in its eleventh year, the Sherlock Expense Evaluation Reports (SEER) supply comprehensive and highly granular financial and operational metrics to help health plans identify whether they operate at best practice and what functional areas provide the greatest returns on management efforts to enhance plan performance. The broad scope of the metrics facilitates drill-downs to identify specific operational issues that can be used to map solutions to performance variances.

While every health plan is different, our reports facilitate the closest comparisons to your plan and our metrics can quantify of any residual differences. Comparability is promoted by segmenting our nearly 50 plan universe into peer groups closely matching size, product mix, or organizational characteristics of your health plan. We also segment administrative activities and costs into product areas to isolate the varying resource consumption of health coverage products.

We control the quality of our metrics through detailed procedures and through our business model. Our participation is voluntary, and access to our benchmarks is limited to those who are committed to the effort: We are organized to eliminate the risk of Tragedy of the Commons.We are also independent: Sherlock Company offers no complementary products, such as business process outsourcing, that could create an appearance of conflicts of interest. Finally, we have extensive quality assurance procedures.

Our benchmarks help you achieve results. One Blue Cross Blue Shield Plan reported $10 million in savings from information systems decisions made using our benchmarks. An independent, provider-sponsored plan achieved savings of $50 million using our benchmarks.

SEER benchmarks enjoy wide acceptance. Health plans serving one of every five insured Americans participated in 2007, and health plans serving at least one-third of all insured Americans used these benchmarks in 2007.

Please contact us regarding the purchase or participation in our performance benchmarking studies.

For further information, please click on the information below

Please click here for a statistical summary of the peer groups that segment our universe of participating health plans.

Please click in the following links for summarization of the results for various universes:

Please click here for a list of the products offered by the participating plans

Please click here for a description of our metrics.

Please click here for a description of our quality assurance procedures.

Please click here for some additional background on SEER.

Are you interested in participating in SEER?