Overview

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Strengthen your ability to plan, budget, and evaluate long‑term financial decisions in healthcare organizations. This course introduces the full financial planning cycle, beginning with the role of strategic planning, operational budgets, and the link between organizational goals and resource allocation. You will learn how healthcare organizations build statistics, revenue, and expense budgets; apply budgeting approaches such as output/input, activity‑based, incremental, and minimum‑level methods; and use variance analysis to monitor performance and guide corrective action. You will then transition to capital budgeting, exploring how organizations assess major investments in buildings, equipment, technology, and new service lines. Topics include evaluating replacement vs. expansion decisions, estimating incremental cash flows, performing payback analysis, and calculating net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) to determine financial feasibility. You will also examine funding sources, risk considerations, project scoring, and post‑audit processes that help improve long‑term decision‑making. By the end of this course, you will be able to develop operational budgets, evaluate capital project proposals, and support strategic financial decisions. Completing the full specialization qualifies you to pursue Credit‑By‑Exam toward university credit.

Syllabus

Operational Budgeting

In our first module, we discuss the importance of the planning and operating budget processes for health care organizations. We review the linkage between strategic planning and the operating budget, and how budgets can be important tools for managing the organization and achieve strategic goals. We cover the different types of budgets that organizations prepare, the various budgeting approaches used, and how to perform variance analysis.

Capital Budgeting

In our final module, we discuss the capital budgeting process for healthcare organizations. We review the types of assets normally included in the capital budget, methods used for evaluating capital budget requests, and how to estimate future cash flows related to capital projects and equipment.

Financial Planning and Capital Budgeting Final Exam and Assignment

In this final module, you’ll pull together the major ideas from the course and apply them to practical healthcare finance situations. We take a big‑picture look at how risk‑based contracts work, what drives medical claims expenses, and how organizations estimate and manage key financial obligations. You’ll also work with core cost and pricing concepts—like direct and indirect costs, cost behavior, cost allocation, and basic pricing methods—to see how financial information supports real decision‑making. To wrap up the course, you’ll complete a final quiz and a short assignment that give you a chance to demonstrate what you’ve learned and apply it in a realistic healthcare context.

Financial and Managerial Accounting in Healthcare Final Exam

Congratulations on completing the course! If you successfully pass the final exam, you may be eligible to receive University of Arizona credit through the credit‑by‑exam process. This opportunity allows you to translate your work in this course into an official academic credential. For more information or support with the process, please reach out to CAPE‑Info@email.arizona.edu.