Leadership, Management and Workforce Development
Sharing Session - 60 Minutes
Simone Singh, PhD, MA
Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy
University of Michigan School of Public Health
Greg Whitman
Project Manager
University of Washington
At present, no national uniform financial reporting standards and systems exist for governmental public health agencies. The Uniform Chart of Accounts (UCOA) for public health addresses this need, allowing state and local agencies to report expenditures and revenues for a standardized set of programs and capabilities. To support the task of crosswalking (or mapping) agency accounting categories to the UCOA by fiscal managers, the Public Health Activities and Services Tracking (PHAST) project has developed a financial reporting tool with online self-guided training, and project staff also provide technical assistance consultations. Pilot study data from 19 state and local health agencies reveal actual, comparable levels and patterns of spending and corresponding revenue sources that show substantial variation across agencies and states. A larger and more representative sample of agencies is needed to understand what drives this variation, and to this end the current phase of the study aims to recruit 100 additional agencies, with 12 members of the Big Cities Health Coalition piloting a peer learning network.
The financial reporting tool provides access to the participating agencies’ data in the form of interactive dashboards that allow users to benchmark their revenues and expenditures and generate data visualizations. Financial data can be downloaded as spreadsheets to support in-depth analysis and visualizations can be downloaded as images or PDFs. Participating agencies are using the information collected in PHAST’s financial reporting tool in numerous ways to improve understanding of expenditures and revenues and inform practice, examples of which will be shared during the session.