The average large U.S. healthcare business is paying more than $1.4 million to manage their corporate expense, compared to a national average of just over $1 million for all businesses, new research from Conferma has found.
The report is intended to reveal multiple inefficiencies in how large U.S. businesses manage their expense.
In 2013, consulting firm Aon Hewitt began reporting data on corporate healthcare costs, and found that costs have risen annually over the past several years, in some cases more than doubling the rate of inflation.
Close to 40 percent of healthcare businesses do not believe that their banks offer the payment options they need. Thirty percent, meanwhile, said they don't have adequate oversight and control over business expenses, while 61 percent said their current expense methods make it difficult to keep track of expenditures. That's a contrast to an industry average of just 38 percent.
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Across all industries, an average of 328 staff members are authorized to make purchases; for the healthcare industry, that number is just 198, according to the study. And yet costs and concerns in the industry are far greater than in those in which more staff are authorised to make payments.
"It would be logical to assume that the more staff authorized to make payments, the more complex and costly the systems would be," Conferma CEO Simon Barker said in a statement. "Yet if you take IT and telecoms, for example, in the companies we spoke to, an average 574 employees are authorized to make purchases. However, the cost for their expenses management is just under $1.2 million, three times as many authorized staff and an average bill of $200,000 less than healthcare. Clearly something is going wrong in this industry."
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