Improving the Oversight Function within Your Hospital: The Power of Financial Information for Decision Making
Course Description
Every healthcare executive and board member has a responsibility to be knowledgeable about the organization's financial statements. The issues faced by your organization's in this increasingly complex environment require management and the board to make well-informed business decisions and to act proactively in challenging times.
Creditors and the government expect your organization to have an effective management and board oversight process in place. Communicating financial data to non-financial administrators and the board can be a formidable task for your organization's financial executives. It is an area that can always use refreshing.
Additionally, it is a truism that organizations need to set goals in order to know the directions in which they want to go. Goal setting is an art as well a science and there are a number of variables that must be addressed to successfully achieve the best results for the organization.
There are a number of steps that need to be taken to develop long range plans (three to five year strategic plans and five year strategic financial plans) and then take the results and move them into short range plans (one year capital and operating budgets). The steps taken to develop the plans have general qualities that use financial statement information to create quantifiable value to the organization.
This three-hour class is designed for the chief executive, operating and financial officers as well as all board members who would prefer to share a common understanding of financial information and the way to use the information to better analyze their results. Further, it has been developed to review the significant and critical implication of long and short range planning. The main areas to be covered will be:
The type of financial information typically being transmitted to the Board by its Administration
What every healthcare executive and board member should know about important financial statement elements , including the five most sensitive financial statement line items,
How to use readily available financial and statistical information to help perform their fiduciary responsibilities.
The importance of maintaining capital within healthcare organizations, and
The key elements of a strategic plan and the strategic financial plan and why it is integral to the maintenance of capital for providers of care
The value of capital and operating budgeting and why they are necessary to the proper operations of healthcare providers
Target Audience
Board Members
Chief Executive Officers
Chief Operating Officers and other Senior Executives
Chief Financial Officers
Faculty
Steven Berger is President of Healthcare Insights, LLC, which specializes in the teaching and consulting of healthcare general and financial management. In addition, Healthcare Insights has developed TRAC, a decision support and management accountability software solution for the healthcare industry.
Prior to his role at Healthcare Insights, Mr. Berger was Vice President, Finance for seven years at 250-bed Highland Park Hospital in suburban Chicago, Illinois. Before Highland Park Hospital and since 1978, he has been a hospital or health system finance officer in New York, New Jersey and Missouri.
Mr. Berger has 28 years of healthcare financial management experience. He holds a Bachelors of Science degree in History and a Master of Science in Accounting from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is a CPA, and a Fellow of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) where he recently served as President of the First Illinois Chapter. Mr. Berger also recently completed a three-year term on HFMA's Board of Examiners. He is also a Diplomate of the American College of Healthcare Executives (CHE).
In addition, Mr. Berger has presented many healthcare finance related seminars throughout the United States and Canada including 3 two-day classes Fundamentals of Healthcare Financial Management, Turning Data into Useful Information and Hospital Financial Management for Non-Financial Managers. He has also co-written articles on healthcare information systems that were published in Healthcare Financial Management magazine and a February 2000 commentary in Modern Healthcare on the lack of training in the healthcare industry.
Mr. Berger is the author of the 344 page book “Fundamentals of Healthcare Financial Management,” published in 1999 by McGraw-Hill and the HFMA. This book was written from a practitioners point of view and is a distillation of Mr. Berger's many years on the inside of healthcare institutions. The second edition of the book was published in January 2002 by Jossey-Bass and is available at www.josseybass.com .
Additionally, Mr. Berger is the co-author of the 2002 textbook, HFMA's Introduction to Hospital Accounting, 4 th Edition , published by Kendall Hunt. It is available at www.hfma.org .
Finally, Mr. Berger recently served as President of the Board of Turning Point, a community, not-for-profit 501(c)(3) mental health agency in Skokie, Illinois and has written the 2003 Book, Understanding Nonprofit Financial Statements for BoardSource. The book is available at www.boardsource.org .
To receive more information about HCI’s professional training services, including cost details and the instructor’s scheduling availability, contact Steven Berger at (847) 362-1244.
E-mail: SBerger@hcillc.com
