Financial & Ethical Standards in Healthcare

Financial Reporting Practices and Ethical Standards in Healthcare

Introduction

Healthcare organizations have to make good use of GAAP (generally acceptable accounting principles) in order to establish a comprehensive system to conduct precise and ethical financial practices to be reported. Both ethical and appropriate financial (reporting) practices are indeed indispensable to ensure future expansion of healthcare organizations. Following ethical standards leads to the prevalence of tryst with the stakeholders. Besides, this also ensures the provision of quality care to the clients and patients. Financial reporting comprises of documentation, record keeping and concrete interpretation of inflow and outflow of budget in the healthcare facility to conclude the attainment of either profit or loss. This paper aims to explore the impact of financial reporting practices to enhance ethical standards in healthcare organizations. Financial reporting indeed capitalizes the integrity of the organizations (Berger, 2008).

Four Elements of Financial Management

Planning

According to Hicks (2013), this element aims to recognize and distinguish certain steps to achieve organizational objectives. It requires to list down all available resources in order to plan how to go about and attain the company targets. There can be more than one plan to remain alive even the worse circumstances. The company objectives are the driving force that tends to give direction to the organization. Objectives should remain static whereas plan can change in accordance with the changing corporate environment that may be beyond the control. There are many factors that are listed down to gauge what can accelerate or impede the process of success of the financial practices (Berger, 2008).

Controlling

This element lays emphasis on controlling the factors that may be positive or negative to the success of the company. The prime purpose of this element is to monitor and control if the plan is being executed in the planned way. Account on every moment that can or is causing apprehensions in following the plan. They can have separate lists of controllable and uncontrollable factors; this makes the task of controlling easy. Even if the change is required, there has to be proper justification to inducting a variance in the plan or implementing a totally different plan.

Organizing and Directing

According to Gallup (2013), resources are indeed unique and important for the survival of the organizations. This is an imperative element to help in the execution of organizational plan(s). Even if the resources are less, the allocation or usage of the available resources makes the difference. Companies with fewer resources can make out bigger benefits in comparison to giant organization on the basis of proper intelligent allocation of the resources. Directions have to come from top management or leaders yet participation of the employees helps in expanding the ownership of the planning and targets of the organizations. Effective usage of resources is certainly makes a great deal.

Decision Making

There is more than one option in almost every situation to select the most appropriate one that suits your organizational objectives. This element bears immense accountability that has long term ...