ABSTRACT
The bottom line identifies whether a clinic is losing more money than making or making more than losing. The net earnings, net income, or net profits are all interchangeable ways to explain the bottom line. While net income is important, it is often important to understand how a clinic’s net income performs to its budget rather than simple net income. Knowing the bottom line is helpful but not always comparable from clinic to clinic or practice to practice. Taking the bottom line and dividing it by the number of providers makes the measure more comparable and more useful. In many clinics, there may be two, or three or more providers that work part-time. In healthcare the largest driver of costs is labor resources. In order to compare the cost driver between providers, practices, and clinics it is helpful to assess the number of full-time equivalent staff that work per provider or full-time equivalent provider.
