Finance in hospitals
provider finance: the revenue cycle and reimbursement, payer mix, cost per case and DRG economics, thin margins, and capital planning for facilities.
Finance in healthcare providers hinges on realities absent from most sectors: revenue arrives through third-party payers, reimbursement rules dictate cash timing, and margins sit thin against heavy fixed costs in labor and facilities. This block equips you to read provider financials with sector fluency, from hospital systems and physician groups to post-acute and outpatient operators. You will work with payer mix, net revenue after contractual allowances, days in accounts receivable, and capital intensity. You will apply US and European benchmarks, understand how CMS and national systems shape economics, and run the diligence checks that surface bad debt, coding risk, and reimbursement exposure. The goal is confident, sector-specific financial judgment.
What you'll master
- Build a provider P&L from gross charges to net patient revenue, adjusting for contractual allowances and bad debt
- Calculate and interpret operating margin, days in AR, days cash on hand, and EBITDA against US and European benchmarks
- Assess payer mix concentration and reimbursement risk to gauge revenue stability
- Run financial due-diligence on a provider, flagging coding, collections, and capital adequacy red flags