Healthcare Accounting: Financial Planning & Capital Budgets

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.