When Healthcare Professionals Understand Business Fundamentals

Abstract

Healthcare workers sometimes struggle with understanding business realities. We offer, as a prescriptive measure, mental accounting, a method of demystifying the recognition of revenues and expenses in healthcare organizations to improve the adoption and successful implementation of information systems. We suggest teaching the “language of business”, to those without a business background, by using a simple mental model explanation of how an organization becomes, and stays, profitable. Such an approach would allow healthcare workers to better understand the “why” of keeping the organization profitable. We offer simple diagrams as a more intuitive way to explain business costs to healthcare workers.