The Patient Care Areas module for Safety Net Clinics provides you with the ability to consider the benefits of adding or including certain room configurations in your clinic. As with all the cost-benefit modules in this website, the focus is on supporting preliminary decisions, such as;
- "Can we afford to build a clinic with three exam rooms and one procedure room?"
- "What will an additional exam room cost us?"
- "Can we afford to include a larger family room in our clinic to accommodate patients who arrive with several children and/or family members?"
- "How do the different cost of labor resources and the labor resource mix affect our ability to produce margin with a given mix of rooms in our clinic?"
The analyses that you can run in this module will allow you and your team to have a more informed discussion with your stakeholders and those who will be designing the facility.
The Patient Care Areas module asks how much your rooms will cost to construct, the size of those rooms, and the various costs allocated to those rooms. You enter expected inflation rates for the costs and benefits. You also enter the discount rate, a term used in capital budgeting that refers to the cost of capital. In other words, if you're faced with a set of projects having different expected returns on investment and just letting the funds sit, what is the lowest rate at which you would invest in one of these projects instead of letting the money sit in a low-risk interest-bearing account?
