Healthcare pays more than any other industry for information technology. At least according to a new survey.

"Our analysis shows healthcare organizations pay an average 17 percent more than that of the other 29 industries we sampled," write the authors of a paper by Net(net), which bills itself as a consultancy specializing in IT optimization, "and 33 percent more than the industry with the lowest average costs (food service).”

And that reality spans the gamut of IT, including financial applications, Microsoft desktop productivity licenses, networking equipment, servers, storage – even vertical applications specifically for healthcare from vendors including Epic, McKesson and Cerner.

[Related: How cloud computing can bring expenditure agility to agency budgets.]

"The breadth of scope of this 'healthcare premium' indicates that this is not an industry-specific difference for one type of technology unique to healthcare, but rather a general premium that applies to all technology,” the authors add.

And there are many reasons for this. Here, then, are the dozen that Net(net) outlined.

1. Healthcare organizations focus on patient care and safety
Unlike many other industries, in healthcare lives are on the line – and that demands “extremely high performance and reliability” of IT. What’s more, the authors note that “the total costs of these initiatives often pale in comparison to the potential liability of a wrongful death lawsuit.”

2. Health entities lack a profit motive
Private, public or non-profit, most healthcare providers now concentrate on driving revenue in the traditional quarterly business cycle. Even still, “when technology costs go up, healthcare providers usually just factor increases in technology costs into the total costs of service without much of an awareness of other, less costly methods to achieve the same result,” the report explains. While CFOs in other realms focus on profit to drive up stock prices and market capitalization, that happens “much less so in healthcare.”

3. Health systems are often inefficient, tough to automate
By nature, health care delivery tends to be subjective and at the same time highly-regulated, which makes both automation and process implementation more difficult. On top of that, the processes often require more technology, according to the report. “Healthcare processes are often more intense due to the necessary verification and re-verification of data and the multiple departments involved. “Most healthcare organizations see technology as a means to an end and do not always have a good handle on their technology spending,” the authors explain. “In some cases, they do not know what they are spending where and for what reason.”

4. Healthcare organizations don’t always negotiate diligently
The culture of trusting experts to decide on a solution, systemic in the delivery of care, extends to IT. “Healthcare organizations view costs largely as a product of the solution, and added in to the total consideration without so much as a second thought,” the authors add. “They do not have the knowledge of other configurations or optimizations to produce an equal or greater organizational value proposition at a significantly lower cost.”

5. The harsh reality of vendor lock-in
“Once healthcare organizations lock in to a vertically integrated technology supplier, they must deal with a supplier that now has monopolistic pricing controls,” the authors note, continuing that there is a significant markup due to the supplier’s certification of these technologies that fall into three categories: not truly required, not fair to the customer, and not justified for the premium associated with the certification.

[Blog: Patient records in the cloud, part 2: Glimpse inside a private datacenter.]

“Technology suppliers understand this and fully leverage that added power to incrementally drive up prices, capture greater wallet and market share in other areas of the organization, and otherwise exploit the added account control in ways that enhance their own objectives.”

6. Single-purpose purchasing
The approach of buying total solutions including hardware, software and services for a specific purpose enables IT vendors “to ‘hide’ margin that would otherwise be more identifiable,” the report states. “The technologies that healthcare organizations purchase for a specific need are not able to be multi-purposed for greater economies of scale. As a result, the actual utilization rates on infrastructure components like servers, storage, and networking equipment are extremely low in healthcare.” And in healthcare, much like the federal government, funding is often allocated for single projects, meaning that each specialty has its own infrastructure, which only drives spending upward.

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