Hospital administration costs can be mercifully expensive costing $361 billion per year in the USA alone, three times what is spent on cancer. Therefore, finding a costing system that gets the most efficient results from administration is crucial, so that more can be spent on hospital's core duties of providing health care. However, despite the rather costliness it serves a central purpose of effectively overseeing the hospitals activities and making sure care quality and safety standards are kept intact. Going into further detail this may involve making sure national/state rules and procedures are adequately followed and managing financials of the hospital, be it setting budgets, providing extra funds to a department or cutting expenses.
In order to apply ABC to hospital administration we have to first split costs into cost pools, some of which are stated below:
Cost Pool Cost Driver
Staffing Number of employees
Registration Number of patients
Education and Training Number of new employees
Receptionist Hours worked
ABC costing in administration is usually applied in much the same way as in other hospital departments or even as in other industries, however as seen in its application at the “Shahid Faghihi” Hospital there can be two major variations when used to find costs of administrative activities.
The first of these is that the interpretation of the word “activity centres” is different in administration to other sectors. Unlike other departmental services, “administ...
... middle of paper ...
...ivity based costing to a surgical unit is identifying activities. This requires great insight into the treatments of specific diseases. The next step, which is the most important one, is to establish cause-effect relationships between resources consumed and physical activities and allocate costs to the chosen cost drivers accordingly. At last, some refinements should be taken into account, such as risks, overtime, charge for early starts and over runs etc.
If A&E Department and Surgical Unit are compared, we see the cost pools and the cost drivers are usually the same. The difference lies in the nature of each department, for example, A&E is a medical treatment facility specialising in taking care of patients who present themselves without a prior appointment, whereas the patients in the surgical unit are constant and are treated as per their given appointments.
I attended the Saturday Lab 1 session discussing the Denison Specialty Hospital case study. In our session, we had a through discussion into the different budget terminology. I learned about the difference between accrual and cash accounting methods, which is based on the timing of when the revenue and expenses are recognized. I also learned about responsibility centers as an organizational unit under the supervision of a manager, who is responsible for its activities and results. In addition, the manager is accountable for the budget of the department that they head. Therefore, a centralized form of management in developing the budget because it makes easier to because the information for the department budget is located
Adding a new floor to Shouldice’s current facility will increase the number of available beds by 45. This could be easily controlled as well as it will certainly help Shouldice to maintain their quality. An addition of a new floor such as this would increase Shouldice’s total capacity, causing a need for more surgeons, as well as staff, thus increasing costs. The construction of the floor alone involves a significant investments and considerable time. Construction will also cause a disruption to the quality and atmosphere of the hospital. Therefore, the plant has limited flexibility.
Physicians in this co-management arrangement are paid by the hospital based on fixed duties developed beforehand. This payment method is important for the enactment of co-management. The fixed-fee structure works in coordination with a clear set of administrative tasks that physicians must complete for the purpose of refining quality, patient safety, and operations of the service line. When these tasks and performance metrics are developed in the contract, leadership must describe the effort or hours that were required to completed these fixed duties
Things that will determine the cost of care provided at an urgent care clinic are:
Each department/service area in the hospital should be charged with the ownership and responsibility for completion of the chargemaster, and with the chargemaster committee serving as information resources for the organizations. Thus, it is imperative that the chargemaster committee engage each departments and service areas in order to develop an effective approach to managing the Chargemaster related issues.
... strategy, the outpatient clinic will benefit in several ways. Intra-departmental meetings will be held, both clinic and hospital staff will be present during such meetings. The staff at the clinic will no longer have to decipher through protocol; the outpatient clinic will be represented. This representation will make for a more productive staff. By making changes to the scheduling department and incorporating inter-departmental meetings, schedulers will have a greater respect for technologist’s workload. Customer service at the outpatient clinic will no longer suffer due to communication gaps. By implementing inter/intra-departmental meetings staff will be able to focus more on the patient and provide them with an overall better experience. By making these suggested changes the outpatient clinic will continue to grow and provide quality care to patients.
This paper describes a problem related to the increased cost of supplies and a decrease in productivity in the surgical services area of Celebration Health. A plan is developed based on these issues, which could aid the unit to become more efficient and cost-effective. This plan will emphasize being cost-effective without compromising quality and safety. Also, it will may improve the fiscal health of the surgical services department by eliminating unnecessary procedures, supplies, and labor, therefore increasing productivity.
A continuous and appropriate financial management is highly essential to sustain and integrated a healthcare program. To build a sustainable integrated program cost calculation and pro formas are necessary to create monthly metrics, program accountability and fiscal sustainability this
Health administrators are often responsible for making financial decisions that impact the quality of care provided by the organizations they support. Sometimes you'll be confronted with competing priorities, like
Supplies expenses accounted for 25.4% of the total expenses and 85.5% of the supply expenses is from other medical supplies. The current practice allows each physician group to make independent decisions, how to run their group. As a result, the hospital is suffering from high medical cost and losing money by not utilizing nurse practitioners and case managers. The quality of care greatly affected by not utilizing of a case manager in coordinating medical services that a patient may require for recovery after hospitalization. Nurse practitioners (NP) can also aid in patient care without compromising the quality of care and enhance orthopedic surgeon’s productivity. When NPs do some of the patient care, the orthopedic surgeons will have more time to do more surgeries which will generate more revenue. Non-standardized protocol created a financial burden to the hospitals, related to medical supply. The physician’s vendor preference could be influenced by vendor relationship and personal benefit rather than evidence that benefit patients and contain costs. The patient’s outcome is going to suffer due to a lack of standardized protocol.
The balance between quality patient care and medical necessity is a top priority and the main concern of many of the healthcare organizations today. Due to the rising cost of healthcare, there has been a change in the focus of reimbursement strategies that are affecting the delivery of patient care. This shift from a fee-for-service towards a value-based system creates a challenge that has shifted many providers’ focus more directly on their revenue. As a result, organizations are forced to take a hard look at the cost of services they are providing patients and then determining if the services and level of care are appropriate for the prescribed patient care.
Operating budget is the most appropriate budget for managing unit cost. The operating budget is a financial plan that takes into consideration all of the day-to-day activities that involve taking care of patients. A units revenue, which is the actual charges, are based off of the total number of days patients spend on the unit or the average daily census. Expenses include all of the cost for paying nursing staff to work, the cost of all supplies that are necessary to provide patient care, and the cost of any additional resources that may be necessary for patient care. The unit expenses can be broken down into two main types of expenses. One, is the employment cost. The employment cost is the largest part of any units budget. This is due
Due to WellStar being a multi facility health system, its organizational design is constantly being reviewed for simpler and more efficient processes. WellStar’s two smallest hospitals, WellStar Paulding and WellStar Douglas, previously under went reconstruction with regards to their hierarchical structure in Patient Access Services (PAS). WellStar Paulding, the smallest facility of the five hospitals, renovated their managerial chain of command in PAS. WellStar Paulding’s patient volume is less than half in comparison to the 4 additional hospitals. As a result, their staff is smaller and only requires minimal supervision. In the past WellStar Administrators requested supervisors for every department, a manager of the entire department, and a director that managed PAS’ management directly and PAS staff indirectly. Recent cuts ...
Healthcare administration is a field that is often overlooked, but is essentially the beating heart of any healthcare organization. With more and more hospital, and clinics, and other healthcare organizations popping up everywhere there is a need for people like me to manage the day-to-day operations. I am choosing to apply to this program because I want to study how the U.S. healthcare system operates. I want to learn the essential skills of operating a healthcare facility such as managing a budget, reducing healthcare costs, analyzing the efficiency of an organization and proposing ways to improve it. This program is going to give me the necessary education and skills so I can carry out my goal of being a healthcare administrator.
When dealing with health care financial management plays a key part of health care financial planning. Several of the financial decisions are made on a daily basis from accounting and all other business transactions that occur. Most of the decisions that are made are made, according to the organizations fiscal objectives, although some are made on the generally accepted accounting principles. Keeping accurate financial records keeps the organizations free from audits and mismanagement of funds.