Good luck with that...it sounds like a huge task! Make sure you have strong executive support, and excellent support from the maker of your EMR/EHR system. Expect resistance from almost everyone who has to learn the new system or change their processes while still doing their regular, full-time job. Probably best to do an incremental changeover, rather than a "big bang" change. Make sure you have multiple versions of your accounting system...development, initial test, final test, and production. That way, you can have an organized change process that allows good testing prior to live rollout. You don't say which country you are in - the U.S.? Is the ownership public or private? Make sure you clearly identify expected benefits, key success criteria, and feature priorities. What are "must have" vs. "like to have" features? The experience and skills of your key staff will determine how completely you succeed. You may need to restate historical financial reports using the new methods each time you produce new reports - decide how far back you are going to re-jigger historical data into the new system. Over-communicate because folks are really busy and will try to ignore your messages because they hope the changes will go away if they ignore them long enough. Shout about your successes and their benefits as you go through the change process, and publicly praise workers who help you succeed.
Thanks for your super reply.
you hit the spot when you said expect resistance from almost everyone. that is exactly what is happening, especially when I talk with staff in labor intensive cost pools such as laundry or kitchen. yayks!
I'm not in the US, i'm in the middle east. ownership is private but not for a family or a fund, its a university hospital owned by a certain organization.
Ignoring my emails has been a common thing! However I am in my late twenties,and have been lucky to get an executive position within the hospital after moving back from the states, so i can blame it on that, my "junior" status.
Moving to more substantial manners: the cost accounting system that has been established isn't bad, but its just not accurate enough to be able to identify cost drivers and just accurate cost analysis of the business.
3 cost pools:
Pool A doesn't generate any revenue
Pool B doesn't generate any revenues, but takes indirect costs from A
Pool C generates all of the hospitals revenues, and takes indirect costs from A+B
MY plan initially was to revamp this whole structure and take a more vertical approach. Activity based will be extremely hard to implement so I was planning on building a model based on Activity-based but kind of simplified.
Anyways! will keep this thread updated as I go through, as I believe its an interesting experience for people in this field.
