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Gathering Financial Information and Analysis

Through this assignment you will be introduced to the basic elements of financial statements and you will have the opportunity to get familiar with the data included in these statements.

Later, in Module 2 assignments, you will go to several sources to gather data that you will use to analyze and benchmark the results from Sakasegawa Memorial Hospital (SMH). You will then form groups of 4 or 5 and have a series of discussions and conduct a quality control check on the assignments of classmates.

Many hospitals are classified as not-for-profit (NFP). The presentation of for-profit (FP) financial statements differs in several respects from NFP accounting. You will probably work for some NFP hospitals during your career and, therefore, you should understand some of the basic elements of NFP statements. In this assignment you will gather data for an FP and an NFP organization, identify the similarities and differences in data presentation, and report on those differences.

Select one FP and one NFP hospital. You must get your facilitator’s approval for both hospitals. Research the hospitals. Then, download and fill in the template with financial information for the FP hospital, the NFP hospital, and the SMH. You will use this information in subsequent sessions.

It is imperative that you ensure the quality of the data you collect. In the latter part of this assignment, you will carry out a quality control check on the data collected by other students.

Instructions for hospital selection and data gathering:

Use the following Web sites to gather financial data for publicly traded healthcare organizations:

• MSN money (homepage). http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/home.aspx
• Investment tools. (n.d.). The Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney. Retrieved March 10, 2009, fromhttp://www.smartmoney.com/tools/

You can obtain financial data for NFP facilities from the following site:

• GuideStar http://www.guidestar.org/

The GuideStar Web site also presents financial data in the format of the IRS Form 990. You should become familiar with this form and learn where to find the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flow.

Besides data for individual companies, the sites have benchmark data for various financial ratios for the hospital industry group. After you have identified the two organizations you will use, you can go directly to the organizations’ Web site and use the investor’s relation tab to acquire the latest financial data.

Your chosen NFP hospitals should have patient revenue between $700 and $1,500 million. You can refer to the annotated IRS Form 990 in the Doc Sharing area for assistance and explanatory notes.

You can visit the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Web site and read instructions for Form 990 and Form 990-EZ. You can also refer to the Form 990 that is available at the Web site.