Management Accounting in Health Care Organizations

Management Accounting in Health Care Organizations offers an introduction to the subject of management accounting and provides a user–oriented approach to the concepts and techniques students need in order to understand management accounting in a health care context. This volume includes the information needed to master the basics of full–cost accounting, differential cost accounting, and responsibility accounting. It describes the uses and limitations of management accounting and the common accounting pitfalls managers face when making routine health care management decisions.

This important text is formatted to provide an interactive learning approach. Students prepare answers to problems as they appear throughout each chapter and analyze one or more practice cases at the end of the chapter. Each chapter’s practice case is followed by several cases that can be assigned for analysis and discussion in the classroom setting.

Management Accounting in Health Care Organizations includes a chapter on each of the following core topics:

• Essentials of Full Cost Accounting: Discusses the kinds of decisions managers make when determining costs and how they can use full cost information in making those decisions.
• Differential Cost Accounting: Distinguishes between full costs and differential costs and when each should be used, discusses cost behavior, explains how to undertake cost–volume–profit analyses, and explains the concept of contribution and its role in alternative choice decision–making.
• Absorption Costing: Shows how to compute the cost of goods manufactured and cost of goods sold with job order and process systems and discusses the role of overhead volume and overhead budget variances in managerial decision making and cost control.
• Activity–Based Costing and Variable Costing: Examines the role of activity–based costing and shows the distinction between absorption costing and variable costing.
• Responsibility Accounting: Discusses the different types of responsibility centers that can exist in an organization, the basis for choosing one type over another, and how to achieve fairness and goal congruence in designing a responsibility center structure.
• Programming and Budgeting: Explores some of the techniques for analyzing investments, addresses the issues involved in budgeting for operating revenues and expenses, and shows how to link the operational budget to the organization’s strategy and structure.
• Measurement and Reporting: Explains the role of the flexible budget in a management control system, demonstrates how to compute variances between budgeted and actual results, examines the relationship between variance analysis and actual results, shows the relationship between variance analysis and management reporting, and discusses the important topic of measuring and reporting on such nonfinancial items as patient satisfaction.
• Implementing a New Responsibility Accounting System: Summarizes the key characteristics of a good responsibility accounting system, shows how the responsibility accounting system must fit with several other organizational activities, and identifies some of the factors that managers must consider when implementing a new or revised system.