Deep Dive: The Real Cost Of Patient Waiting
- Frontier-IQ
- May 9
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Those endless days between prescription and first dose aren't just inconvenient—they're a serious risk to achieving positive patient outcomes. And to compound the issue, the lost days are bleeding significant revenue dollars and burning out your support staff. Here's what patient waiting is really costing you.
INTRODUCTION
Most life sciences companies track time-to-therapy as just another KPI. But while you're watching dashboards, patients are abandoning treatment, revenue is evaporating, and your reputation with providers is eroding daily.
Your CRM can't fix what it doesn't understand: patient waiting isn't a metric—it's a business emergency.
THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL COST OF PATIENT WAITING
Financial Impact: The Revenue You're Losing Right Now
Your quarterly revenue reports aren't showing you the whole truth. Every day of enrollment delay costs you real money—not in theoretical future losses, but in actual dollars disappearing from your balance sheet today, that can’t be recovered...
When patients face out-of-pocket costs above $500, abandonment rates skyrocket to 60%. Even a slight increase from $0 to $10 can double abandonment rates.
Lost prescriptions lead to lost patients, who may never return and now view your company negatively.
Those retroactive reports you're reviewing. They're hiding the patients who quit during benefits verification—before they even register in your system. Your pharmacy benefit managers report an average of $200 lost for every open or no-show appointment slot. Multiply that by thousands of patients and weeks of unnecessary waiting—now you see the real cost.
Clinical Consequences: Beyond the Balance Sheet
Patient waiting creates a cascade of health deterioration that your quarterly metrics don't capture:
Disease progression accelerates during administrative delays
Treatment effectiveness decreases with every week of delay
Provider frustration mounts with 94% of physicians reporting prior authorization delays in necessary care
Trust erodes between patients and the entire healthcare system
When patients with cancer face delays in medication access, research shows abandonment correlates with worse outcomes. This isn't about patient satisfaction scores—it's about clinical results your current system is undermining.
Operational Drain: The Hidden Resource Sink
Your patient support team isn't inefficient—they're drowning in workarounds created by your retrofitted CRM.
The American Medical Association reports physicians spend over 12 hours weekly on prior authorizations alone. Your hub coordinators? They're spending even more time fighting the same inefficient systems.
Every manual check on a verification status, every duplicate data entry, and every phone call chasing a form aren't process issues. They are direct consequences of using sales software to manage life-saving therapy access.
The administrative waste in US healthcare now totals approximately $248 billion annually.
Your organization's share of that waste grows with every day they wait for medication.
WHY TRADITIONAL CRMs MAKE THIS WORSE, NOT BETTER
Those healthcare modules bolted onto your sales CRM aren't solving the fundamental problem. They're adding complexity without addressing the core issue: systems designed for pipeline management will never optimize patient access.
A shocking 80% of specialty prescribers say it should take two weeks or less to get a patient started on therapy, but only 20-30% say it actually does. When patients need specialty medication access, your current system:
Creates data silos between verification teams, hub services, and pharmacies
Requires manual re-entry of critical information
Lacks real-time visibility into bottlenecks
Reports problems after they've already delayed patient care
That's not a process issue—that's a fundamentally broken approach.
THE PATIENT-FOCUS™ DIFFERENCE: A PURPOSE-BUILT SOLUTION
Unlike retrofitted sales platforms, Patient-Focus™ was designed from the ground up to address the specific challenges of specialty medication access. Our approach doesn't just report delays—it's built to help prevent them from occurring.
Patient-Focus™ eliminates the primary bottlenecks that current research identifies as key barriers to timely therapy:
Streamlined verification workflows that eliminate redundant steps
Visibility across the entire patient journey from prescription to administration
Integration capabilities that reduce manual data entry and errors
Proactive identification of potential access barriers before they delay care
Continuous data collection to evaluate the corrective measure put in place
The result? Patients receive critical medication when they need it—and your revenue arrives when it should.
NEXT STEPS: STOP MEASURING DELAYS AND START ELIMINATING THEM
Your current CRM can't fix what it was never designed to handle.
Patient-Focus™ delivers purpose-built enrollment workflows that get patients to therapy faster.
Stop tracking metrics that don't matter. Start measuring what does matter: the patient’s access to life-saving medication.
REFERENCES
IQVIA Institute. "Understanding the Use of Medicines in the U.S. 2025." (April 2025)https://www.iqvia.com/insights/the-iqvia-institute/reports-and-publications/reports/understanding-the-use-of-medicines-in-the-us-2025
Health Affairs Journal. "Estimating The Impact Of Out-Of-Pocket Cost Changes On Abandonment." (January 2024)
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2023.00808
CoverMyMeds. "Overcoming Affordability Challenges with Patient-Centered Solutions." (2023)https://insights.covermymeds.com/research-and-analysis/affordability/overcoming-affordability-challenges-with-patient-centered-solutions
Axiom Medical. "Clocking the Cost: 8 Consequences of Long Patient Wait Times." (January 2024)
https://www.axiomllc.com/blog/consequences-of-long-patient-wait-times/
AMA. "Health insurance denials, delayed care and medication access: How prior authorization hurts patients." (July 2024)
Center for American Progress. "Excess Administrative Costs Burden the U.S. Health Care System." (2021)
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/excess-administrative-costs-burden-u-s-health-care-system/
Surescripts. "Inaccurate and Incomplete Data Delays Specialty Treatment for Patients." (September 2022)
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