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3 minute read
Fifty-six percent of physicians describe a lasting change in how they grant pharma reps access since COVID, whether that's more virtual visits, tighter restriction, or a permanent shift to appointment-only scheduling. If the commercial benchmarks your team is measured against were built before 2020, there's a real chance they're scoring this year's field force against a market that no longer exists.
That finding comes from "What Earns HCP Time," led by Chitra Alagarsamy, Product Owner for Promotional Effectiveness Tracking at ZoomRx, a life sciences market research consultancy serving pharma and biotech brand teams. For anyone setting or defending a commercial budget, that raises a direct question: when was the benchmark you're being measured against last rebuilt?
What Changed, by the Numbers
Post-COVID access hasn't settled into one outcome. In the study, physicians split four ways when asked how access has evolved:
- 39% say access returned to pre-COVID norms
- 26% describe a lasting shift toward more virtual or hybrid access
- 17% report continued restriction or reduced access
- 13% moved to a more structured, appointment-driven model, and prefer it that way
Add the last three groups together (26 plus 17 plus 13) and 56% of physicians describe access that has permanently changed, not reverted. One neurologist in an office-based practice explained why the shift stuck even after the original reason for it disappeared: "Appointment-only actually worked better for us, we could manage our time and reserve dedicated space. COVID forced the structure; we kept it because it works."
The Part Benchmarks Usually Miss: Who Actually Controls Access
Most commercial teams already do the harder part of benchmarking well: tracking KPIs consistently, wave over wave, against a stated target. What's easier to miss is whether the access model underneath that target still matches how access actually works today.
In the study, access control sits across three layers, and no single one, including the physician, fully owns the decision. Practice-wide policy is the dominant gatekeeper at 61%, ahead of the physician's own preference at 56% and front office staff managing scheduling at 32%. In academic settings, a fourth layer, an institutional rep relations department, can govern access independently of the physician entirely. One oncologist at an academic medical center described it plainly: "Sales reps do not have direct access to physicians in my institution, it has to go through the rep relations department and it is heavily governed."
A field strategy or benchmark built around physician preference as the primary lever is optimizing for the second-most-influential layer, not the first. Once access is actually granted, what earns the physician's time during that visit is a separate question, covered in ZoomRx's research on what earns a physician's time in 2026.
The Budget Question This Raises
None of this means a current benchmark is wrong. It may hold up fine. But a benchmark is a comparison, and a comparison is only as good as the market it was calibrated against. If call frequency targets, territory sizing, or field headcount assumptions were set against a pre-2020 access model, one with more unannounced visits and less practice-wide gatekeeping, they're now being applied to a physician population that, for more than half of respondents, doesn't operate that way anymore.
That's a different question than whether the team is hitting its numbers. A team can hit an outdated number and still be under-resourced or mis-targeted for the market as it exists today. And a benchmark is only as trustworthy as the tracker feeding it, which is its own separate check, covered in 5 questions to ask about your promotional effectiveness tracker.
The question worth bringing into a budget conversation: when your team's current benchmark was last rebuilt, was the access model underneath it checked against what physicians report today, or is this wave still running against a comparison point from 2019?
This data is drawn from ZoomRx's "What Earns HCP Time" study, led by Chitra Alagarsamy, ZoomRx's Product Owner for Promotional Effectiveness Tracking, surveying 105 US physicians in 2026. The full report is available as an ungated resource below:
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