Health care and Hospitals

Auditors in hospitals allocate their time primarily to financial/compliance and operational types of audits, as do their counterparts. The current trend is towards more operational types of audits.

In the healthcare industry, where the focus is on delivering quality clinical treatment to the patients, a hospital internal auditor becomes even more vital. All the stakeholders in a hospital, including the administrative team, doctors and paramedical staff, consistently deal with life and death crisis throughout their work life and have one primary goal of improving their patients’ well-being. In such settings, hospital risk management practices take a back-seat.

Realizing the need for an internal audit, a large number of hospitals in India are engaging internal auditors to evaluate their hospital’s operational policies and risk management practices along with its financial performance, an approach that was not very conventional until the last decade or so. This move is also enthused by the increasing number of medico-legal and litigations cases filed against hospitals in India. Major areas like in-patient billing, inventory management & purchase, quality assurance & compliance management and finance department are often under the hospital internal auditor’s scanner. Furthermore, an internal audit helps augment the hospital revenue by eliminating revenue leakages.