Healthcare organizations operate under an unusual financial and operational reality. Unlike many businesses, they rarely determine revenue simply by multiplying units sold by a market price. Hospitals, physician groups, ambulatory centers, post-acute providers, health plans, and other healthcare organizations operate within complicated reimbursement arrangements involving government programs, commercial insurers, negotiated contracts, prospective payment systems, value-based arrangements, patient cost sharing, regulatory requirements, and increasingly, financial risk for the cost and quality of care.
At the same time, healthcare operations involve difficult capacity and resource decisions. Executives must coordinate expensive facilities, highly specialized labor, clinical technology, pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, operating rooms, inpatient beds, diagnostic services, ambulatory facilities, scheduling systems, and patient flows while maintaining quality, safety, access, and financial sustainability.
Healthcare Finance & Operations is therefore designed as an advanced managerial course at the intersection of healthcare economics, corporate finance, managerial accounting, reimbursement, operations management, and clinical delivery. It intentionally moves beyond introductory material about financial statements, basic healthcare organizations, or the general structure of insurance. Instead, students learn how executives translate reimbursement rules, patient volumes, payer contracts, clinical capacity, labor utilization, service-line economics, working capital, capital investment, and operational performance into enterprise decisions.
The course emphasizes the crucial relationship between financial performance and operational design. A hospital cannot solve a capacity problem through budgeting alone; a physician organization cannot solve reimbursement pressure without understanding productivity and care delivery; and a health system cannot successfully assume value-based financial risk without developing the operational capabilities required to manage populations.
The goal is to train students to think like healthcare executives who must continuously ask: Where does the organization earn and lose money? What operational processes drive those economics? Where is capacity constrained? What does an additional patient or procedure actually contribute financially? Which service lines should grow? Where is capital being consumed? What risks are hidden in reimbursement contracts? And how can financial discipline support rather than undermine high-quality patient care?
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
• Analyze healthcare organizations using advanced financial and operational frameworks.
• Understand how reimbursement mechanisms translate clinical activity into organizational revenue.
• Evaluate payer mix and reimbursement exposure.
• Interpret contribution margins and service-line economics.
• Distinguish fixed, variable, direct, indirect, and capacity-related healthcare costs.
• Evaluate hospital and physician enterprise financial performance.
• Analyze patient volume, utilization, capacity, throughput, and productivity.
• Understand healthcare revenue-cycle economics and operational dependencies.
• Evaluate managed-care contracts from a financial perspective.
• Assess financial implications of fee-for-service and value-based payment arrangements.
• Understand capitation, shared savings, bundled payments, and downside financial risk.
• Evaluate healthcare labor economics and workforce productivity.
• Analyze operating-room, inpatient, ambulatory, emergency, and diagnostic capacity.
• Apply forecasting and budgeting concepts to healthcare organizations.
• Evaluate healthcare capital investments using financial and strategic criteria.
• Understand working-capital and liquidity pressures unique to healthcare organizations.
• Evaluate supply-chain and pharmaceutical cost exposure.
• Connect quality, patient safety, and operational reliability with financial performance.
• Develop executive dashboards integrating clinical, operational, and financial indicators.
• Diagnose financially distressed healthcare operations and identify appropriate turnaround priorities.
• Integrate finance and operations into healthcare enterprise strategy.
