MEDITECH
Budgeting and Forecasting
product brief

MEDITECH's Budgeting and Forecasting application offers health care organization executives, facility administrators, and department managers a powerful tool to create and manage their budgets. Executives, facility administrators, and department managers benefit from:

Highlights:
   • Access to system-wide, current and historic data such as personnel, payor and patient information; resource and material consumption and costs; actual and projected revenue; actual and projected costs of services
   • "What if" analysis on data to aid in projecting and forecasting budgetary information without corrupting the original data
   • Ability to factor in variables such as depreciation and inflation percentages, staff size fluctuations, price changes, new purchases of equipment and supplies, etc.
   • Consistent and coordinated budgeting processes and formats throughout the organization
   • Ability to include on-line notes related to specific budget numbers.

Standard Features

Worksheets
Each department's budget is created by the appropriate budget planner using on-line worksheets. Budget fields are identical in every worksheet regardless of department or facility, ensuring that each department's budget is generated through a consistent methodology. A budget administrator can issue constraints (such as financial limitations) on each department's worksheet.

“What If” Analysis
The application projects future budgetary considerations or scenarios with its "what if" analysis feature. A budget planner can enter numbers based on various criteria, experimenting with different budget numbers until the most desirable distribution is created. Several versions of any budget plan can be created in order to project or forecast budgets or specific variables within a budget.

A budget administrator can likewise utilize the application's "what if" analysis capabilities to experiment with the numbers in the master budget model or adjust transdepartmental variables, such as the inflation rate, in order to view the impact on the overall budget.

On-Line Notes
Budget planners can enter on-line notes in the form of free text to explain budget numbers. Notes can be written for each number or for only those that warrant explanations. Likewise, a budget administrator can write on-line notes explaining why the department's budget was approved or altered.

Setting Or Changing Variable
A budget administrator sets the approved rates for the variables in the master budget and each budget planners' worksheet. When reviewing the department budgets submitted to the master budget, the administrator can change a variable's rate either to see its effect on the rest of the budget numbers or simply to update the variable (i.e., inflation rate).

Access In and Out of the Network
Due to its integration with the MEDITECH HCIS, the Budgeting and Forecasting application can be accessed by planners and administrators with the proper password authorization through a workstation located in:
• Their facilities
• Any facility in their health care network
• An off-site location -- such as a physician’s office or home office -- using a modem.

Organization-Wide Budget on a Single Screen
The information from each department's worksheet is uploaded into the master budget model. Budget administrators can then view on a single screen:
• Totals for the entire organization (including multi-facility organizations)
• Grand totals for all departments
• Totals by selected department(s) only
• Budget numbers for each facility in the organization
• Totals in specific categories for all departments, such as total pay increases
• The drilled-down numbers that constitute the detail of a specific department's budget plan
• On-line notes explaining budget numbers.

Overriding Departmental Budgets
An override/edit feature allows budget administrators to adjust each department's budget. To manually adjust a number, the budget administrator simply enters a new number into the cell. The new number appears underlined to show that it was manually entered by a user and not factored and entered by the system. Any changes to variables, such as changing the inflation rate, will not affect the new number. All numbers in the budget affected by the new (or manually entered) number are automatically recalculated to reflect that change. The overridden number can be recalled with the touch of a key.

Security Measures
The application provides a number of security features:
• Password-based security checks appear at several levels in the system
• Audit trails record all changes made to the data, identifying the time the change occurred and the individual making the change
• Audit reports track access to models (time/date and terminal location).

Excellent Uses In Addition To Budgeting
With its access to data from throughout the HCIS, the Budgeting and Forecasting application is also very helpful for planning purposes in many other areas of the health care organization. Users may find its features useful in:
• General Ledger Expense Projections
• Projected Number of Employees
• Projected Salaries of Employees
• Projected Patient Days
• Admissions Projections
• Revenue Projections
• Managed Care (Third-Party) Contract Analysis and Negotiation
• Service Volume Projections
• Reimbursement Projections.

For more information about us, contact a MEDITECH Marketing Representative

MEDITECH
Medical Information Technology, Inc.
MEDITECH Circle
Westwood, MA 02090
781-821-3000
www.meditech.com