iHealthbeat (reg rqd) put me onto this Information week article which says that health care organizations report that their spending on IT has gone from 2.7% of revenues to 3.3% in the past year. That’s a pretty big jump of over 20%.  Several of the interviewees in the article say their spending has gone up by more than 30%.  This includes some huge IDNs like Caregroups in Boston, and Sutter in California.  Although they’re not quoted in the article, a similar huge effort is underway at Kaiser. For many years it’s been trotted out by consultants like me that healthcare only spends 1-2% of its revenues on IT whereas financial service companies spend 5-10%.  So the question becomes, is this jump just brought upon by fear of HIPAA or is there a real transformation going on?