Managerial Accounting for Healthcare Flashcards
_____________ accounting is purposed to provide accounting information, generally historical in nature, to external users, including owners, lenders, suppliers, the government and insurers.
Financial
__________ accounting is purposed to provide accounting information, generally current or prospective in nature, to internal users, including managers. Such information supports the planning and control management functions.
Managerial
What are the four major categories of cost characteristics?
Traceability
Behavior
Management responsibility
Future / historical
What is cost traceability?
What are the two subcategories?
The ability to determine where your funds have gone;
direct - traceable to a specfic object/ event (e.g. lab tests, salaries, supplies, rent, etc.)
indirect - untraceable without arbitrary assignment (e.g. depreciation, employee benefits, allocated resources from another department)
What type of cost includes both direct and indirect?
What are average costs?
Full costs;
the full cost divided by the number of products and/or services
What values need to be known to calculate average costs?
Total (full) cost;
relative value units
Full cost / relative value units = average cost
Cost structure is determined by the relative amounts of what three factors of cost behavior?
1. Variable costs (e.g. gloves, MRI use, specific medications)
2. Fixed costs (e.g. rent)
3. Mixed costs (semi-fixed, semi-variable, curvilinear) (e.g. salary, number of patients per provider, etc.)
What are marginal costs?
The variable cost of producing one unit (of whatever product)
How do variable costs (e.g. amount of gloves, medication, MRI usage) change with output changes?
Linearly

How do fixed costs (e.g. rent) change with output changes?
They do not

How do mixed/semi-variable/semi-fixed costs (e.g. seeing X more patients means you need to hire another provider) change with output changes?
In a stepwise manner (non-proportionally)

Identify each of the following as either a fixed, a variable, or a mixed cost.
o Rent
o MRI Machine
o Physician Salaries
o Latex Gloves
Rent - fixed
MRI machine - variable
Physician salaries - mixed
Latex gloves - variable

B.
What does it mean for a cost to have controllability?
The cost can be influenced by managerial decisions (e.g. labor costs; not utility costs)
What are the four types of cost to be considered when discussing historical and future costs?
- Avoidable
- Sunk
- Incremental
- Opportunity
What is an avoidable cost?
Activity-dependent cost (can be eliminated if an activity is discontinued)
What is a sunk cost?
Costs already lost / unregainable (unaffected by the decision under consideration)
What is an incremental cost?
Management action implement change (e.g. a new provider on the payroll) resulting in increased costs that should bring in more revenue (i.e. an investment)
What are opportunity costs?
Values lost by using a resource in a particular way instead of the next best way
What is cost allocation?
I.e. describe the role of cost centers and revenue-generating centers in relation to one another.
The process of assigning pooled indirect costs to specific cost objects using an allocation base that represents a major function of a business.
(I.e. the cost centers’ lost funds are ‘absorbed’ by the revenue-generating centers. The remaining funds are the profit.)
What is an allocation base?
A cost driver;
a volume metric that is used to allocate costs, based on its cause-and-effect relationship to why the costs occurred.
E.g. the cost driver for laundry is the pounds of laundry present; the cost driver for HR is the number of employees you have at the company
A business has a contribution margin per unit of $50, has fixed costs of $5,000, and wants to achieve a total profit of $10,000.
How many units must the business sell to earn that total profit of $10,000?
300
($10,000 + $5,000) / $50
A hospital has visits from a charge-based fee-for-service payer. The payer wants to move its 50 enrollees to a capitation system. What per member per month rate must be set on these patients to maintain the current profit level?
FFS revenue per visit: $20
Variable cost per visit: $5
Fixed annual cost: $300
FFS annual visits: 100
$3.33 per member per month
($20/visit * 100 visits) / (50 members * 12 months)
NOTE: COSTS DO NOT MATTER HERE AS THEY DID NOT CHANGE.
A hospital has a volume reduction of 100 procedures and profits drop from $70,000 to $50,000. What is the profitability index of the procedure?
$200
$20,000 / 100