Weekly Business Insights 02/12/2024
Hospital Costing Methods: Four Decades of Literature Review. Moderating Role of Cost Accounting Information Quality on the Relationship Between the COVID-19 Pandemic and Budgeting in Public Hospitals. Cost Management In Healthcare: Status Quo And Opportunities.
Hospital Costing Methods: Four Decades of Literature Review
Healthcare costs now represent a significant proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) in most countries. After the pressure from the recent pandemic crisis, the healthcare sector is facing significant challenges as a result of market demands, competition, and regulation, which are pressuring hospitals to change the way they operate and make decisions. The need to improve the performance of hospitals is evident, but at the same time, there is the possibility of visualizing an epistemological disquiet in the face of the different currents shared in the social sciences, especially in management, where they find great scope for development. The rapid evolution of technological equipment and therapeutic options and the high prices of medical materials, among other factors, create an environment in which it is not only advantageous but necessary to conduct cost studies in hospital institutions.
The hospital environment presents both opportunities and challenges for researchers and illustrates how hospitals’ choices of costing methods are guided by the institutional environment in which they operate. Incorporating the diversity of this institutional environment into research can help researchers make better predictions about costing systems combined with governance models for better performance analyses.
https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/16/10/433
Moderating Role of Cost Accounting Information Quality on the Relationship Between the COVID-19 Pandemic and Budgeting in Public Hospitals
This study makes the following contributions. First, it contributes to a better understanding of how budgeting practices are used and influenced by organizational responses to crises. Second, it provides empirical evidence on the moderating role of cost accounting information in the relationship between the effect of a crisis and budget use. We extend the work of Becker (2016) by providing empirical evidence on the moderating role of cost accounting information on the relationship between the effect of a crisis and budgeting. We not only explore actual changes in the intensity of budget use (and not because perceptions of their importance have changed), we also highlight the role of cost system design.
Examining how the quality of cost accounting information provided by the cost system interacts with the impact of a crisis on enterprises and brings about changes in the intensity of budget use for management control purposes. A developed more complex model than those found in previous studies by investigating both the direct effects and the moderating impact of the quality of cost information to better understand how crises influence budgeting) in changing the degree of budget use in a crisis environment.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/auar.12393
Cost Management In Healthcare: Status Quo And Opportunities
The accelerated pace of change and increased complexities, characteristics of the environment in which many industries find themselves today, have prompted business leaders to rely on their finance and accounting teams more than ever before. The healthcare industry is no exception. As one of the largest, most complex, and truly essential industries in the world, the healthcare industry finds itself constantly challenged to improve quality and lower costs while delivering value. Consequently, the role of cost management, led by management accountants(i.e., accountants and financial professionals in business), and the need for innovative approaches to cost management have become critical to the healthcare industry’s sustainability and positive contribution to people, society, and the economy. The findings reveal growing business demand for finance functions to deliver greater value through efficient data analysis and strategic insight generation. Some finance teams meet this demand by playing leading roles in revenue management, performance analysis and measurement, and investment decisions.
Yet many healthcare finance and accounting teams face limited resources within, underpinning, and surrounding their functions to deliver this value well beyond the traditional accounting, costing, control, and reporting scope. Outdated systems, data integrity and access, scarce human resources, and limited leadership bandwidth pose challenging barriers to modernization initiatives.
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