Before beginning this assignment, please review to the podcast below (ATTACHED)

For this assignment, you will need to refer to the following set of financial data:

• Creekside Community Hospital Data (ATTACHED)

Utilize the following information:

• Hospital Characteristics (see attached financials)
• Competitive environment, declining market share to competitors
• Moderate to substantial debt
• Facility and equipment that is fairly current, but will have future investments in capital
• Partial electronic medical record system
• Mediocre quality and patient satisfaction scores
• Few employed physicians/ no hospitalist program
• Split payor mix between public and private
• Overall not profitable from operations in most recent fiscal year
• Local Physician Practices Characteristics
• Small primary care and specialty practices (mixture of solo and small groups)
• Independent ownership
• Loose affiliation with hospital
• Combination of office and hospital practice

Both Hospital and Physician organizations have contract-only relationships with payors and suppliers and are currently not working with either in any strategic way financially.

You are hired as a financial consultant to prepare a financial strategy (or strategies) to the hospital as they transition from the current environment to the future environment that will be impacted by health care reform due to governmental intervention, as well as changes from within the industry itself.

Specifically, your strategy should consider more than one alternative (outcome). When formulating your response, consider addressing the following topics at a minimum (feel free to add other financial topics as well). This Consultant?s Report should include about one page for each topic:

1. Based upon the following financials attached, assess the current liquidity, profitability, and capital structure and what your recommendations would be for improving these for the future. Give 3-4 concrete financial recommendations based on this information.
2. Address how a strong operating and capital budget process would assist achieving future financial goals (what tools might you employ?). Explain why accurate cost allocation is important. What would be the priorities for capital budgets (in general, not specifically)?

APA format for any references

Incase01 Income from operations Noncash expenses Change in accounts receivable Change in inventories Change in other current assets Change in accounts payable Change in accruals Change in current portion of LT debt Net cash flow from operations $ 3.214 $ 2.629 $ 1.952 2.326 1.083 0.473 (0.065) (0.029) 0.399 (0.014) 0.205 (0.345) 0.250 0.518 0.154 (0.180) $ 7.192 $ 5.378 $ Page 1 2.102 $ 2.458 2.633 2.756 (1.315) (1.739) (0.091) (0.078) (0.395) (0.220) 0.325 0.507 0.043 (0.327) 1.231 0.124 4.533 $ 3.481 Creekside Community Case Podcast Transcript Speaker 1: Welcome to the podcast for the consultant group report project. In this project working as a group you're asked to use the financial and operational information from Creekside Community Health earlier in the course, along with the assumptions on Blackboard for hospital characteristics and local physician practices. Utilizing that information, prepare a financial strategy or strategies for management and board of the hospital as they transition from their current operating and strategic environment into a future environment that will be impacted by health care reform and changes within the industry itself. You're asked to answer and address the following questions listed on Blackboard, six questions, that will integrate many topics that we covered throughout the course. It's important to keep in mind there's no right or accurate or not even necessarily best strategy that we're looking for in this group project. Basically just to put yourselves in the position of the management and board of this hypothetical organization where you have a fair amount of information, but not necessarily all the information that may be needed and to address those questions and assemble a strategy that you believe would best suit the organization going forward. The idea would be that the organization with your recommendations would be well prepared to operate into the future, even if that was perhaps significantly different from how they operate it now. Think about all the topics that we covered in this course. Think about the changes that are forthcoming within health care. By answering the questions and performing the financial analysis for Creekside, assemble what you believe would be the best course or courses of action that management and the board should consider. 1