UW-Madison | Executive Education

Financial Management for the Health Care Professional

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Executive Education > Courses > Financial Management for the Health Care Professional

Financial Management for the Health Care Professional

A joint offering by Executive Education and Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Public Health

 

What are your medical facility’s vital signs? In today’s competitive health care environment, it’s essential for you to keep your finger on the financial pulse of your medical organization.

In fact, your medical organization is really a specialized type of business with very specific requirements and limitations — one in which your primary deliverable is compassionate, caring and state-of-the-art treatment, but one where you still face the same types of challenges that traditional businesses do, such as:

Increasing competition…pressures to keep costs down…expectations of excellent service…myriad suppliers…new technologies…substantial labor and insurance costs…and more!

Plus, you face specialized challenges that most businesses don’t have to consider, like:

• Changes in government funding and reimbursement rates
• Tough negotiations with managed-care companies and other large buyers
• Expectations that your medical practitioners will be up to date on the latest techniques and procedures, and will serve the community at large

It’s no wonder it’s tough to keep track of your facility’s vital signs and diagnose business problems before they get out of control.

Get the help you need with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “Financial Management for the Health Care Professional” course. This interactive learning experience combines lively discussion, case studies and hands-on practice with the expertise of discussion leaders who know the ins and outs of financially managing medical practices. You’ll return to your job energized and armed with tools and techniques to make lasting, positive changes in the way you work with your financial and non-financial information.

Critical care for the medical practice

To keep your medical organization financially healthy, you must keep one step ahead of foreseeable problems. That’s where the financial data you monitor comes in. Each bit of information you receive provides clues to the operation of your organization, and you have to know how best to use it.

That’s why you must attend “Financial Management for the Health Care Professional.” This critical course will show you how to analyze the data you receive and turn it into indicators of the health of your organization. You’ll:

• Discover tools that will help you set goals and determine how well they’re being met
• Manage crucial resources like personnel costs and investments in new technologies
• Track indicators of financial health
• And more!

You’ll return to your job with the tools to:

• Go beyond simply monitoring financial information to interpreting and using it to plan, manage and make effective decisions specifically for your health care organization
• More effectively communicate how your unit contributes to broader strategic objectives of your organization with your management team, administration, board of directors and lending organizations
• Apply management accounting techniques that will allow you to assess the impact of alternate scenarios and better control outcomes
• Recognize when you’re operating on a razor-thin margin and realize how to improve your financial position
• Develop a consistent method for determining and allocating the true costs of your services
• Understand the economic incentives embedded in different pricing strategies — fee-for-service, DRG and capitated methods — and the importance of revenue cycle management
• Implement a balanced scorecard framework to supplement traditional financial measures and align your organization around more market-oriented, customer-focused strategies
• Measure the impact of improvements in process flow, productivity and other system-wide enhancements to maximize efficiencies in labor use and supply management

Who should attend?

• Managing physicians
• Health care operation and administrative professionals
• Clinical managers
• Program directors

Your bonus for attending…

The essential resource guide for health care financial professionals!

Attend this important course and return to your job with The Financial Management Guide, a comprehensive resource filled with everything you need to apply the techniques you’ll learn in the course.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison, as a member of the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA), authorizes this course for 1.3 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) or 13 hours.