Sherlock Benchmarks are often called the "gold standard" to measure and manage health plan performance. They are critical tools to enhance operational performance and competitive position. They also support strategic initiatives ranging from management of the product portfolio, vendor negotiations, outsourcing and business combinations.

The highly valid, well-populated benchmarking reports provide an unbiased ranking and helps prioritize cost management activities to have the greatest impact on improving your health plan's overall operating performance. The current environment rewards organizations that optimize their costs, and the Sherlock Benchmarks are an appropriate and necessary tool to achieve this goal.

The 21st annual Sherlock Benchmarks supplies 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 highest 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.

The broad scope and deep granularity of the benchmarks are shown in the Tables of Contents. Sherlock Benchmarks are provided in hard copy and two electronic forms. The PDF version permits users to copy the reports for use throughout their organization in a form that is identical to the hard copies. The Microsoft Excel ® version allows desktop access to each analysis and metric of the Reports.

The Sherlock benchmarks are broadly accepted. They represent the cumulative experience of more than 815 health plan years, and approximately 40 health plans serving approximately 50 million members are participating in the current study. Current users serve 175 million insured, or approximately 75% of the total. Consulting firms use our benchmarks in service to their clients and our Benchmarks have been used for public policy purposes. Some citations follow.