HEA 612 Health Care Financial Analysis

This guide will help you perform environmental scans for your health care sector using both library resources and freely available web sources.

• Market Scan links to a general scan for the health care industry and provides information on how to find information for your specific health care topic.
• Company Info covers how to find information on a specific company (hospital, health care company, insurance company, etc.). 
• Information for Distance Students, which covers what services are available to distance students (including who's eligible) and how to access materials as a distance student.

Start here: the resources in this section are designed as market scans of the industry.

• Healthcare Sectors Industry Analysis is an industry report from the Mergent database that provides an overall view of the health care market, for both the US and Canada. Great overall background information. Link goes directly to a PDF page (no searching required).

• Mintel provides industry reports for various subareas within the health care field; not every possible subarea is covered. 

  To log in and view these reports:
  1. Click on the Mintel link above; you will be asked to log in with your WCU login and password if you are off campus.
  2. On the splash page that comes up, click on I Agree.
  3. Then under My Reports, click on Read Latest Reports.
     
  4. Then choose Health and Wellbeing from the list of Sectors. The list of reports appears below the list of sectors.

Journal articles may do an environmental scan of your sector and/or provide statistics to help support your case.

• Medline - this database searches through the biomedical literature, so some of it will be more focused on the medical aspects than the financial side. However, using the following tips you should find information on the finances of your sector.

   

  1. Enter Health Care Sector in the first search box.
  2. In the Select a Field dropdown menu next to the first search box, select MM Exact Major Subject Heading.
  3. Enter the specific sector you are investigating, such as cancer, in the second search box, and click Search.
  

  For more information on searching MEDLINE, follow this tutorial.

• International Journal of Health Care Finance & Economics is a full text journal devoted to health care finance.You can browse through the issue or you can search within the journal for your topic.

Try these next: While not designed specifically as market scans, these sources provide statistics that give you a picture of the sector and allow you to evaluate opportunities for growth.

1. If the full text isn't available in the database you are in (indicated by a PDF or HTML symbol), click on Find It/Check Availability to see if we have it in another database.
2. On the new page that appears, click the link next to where it says Full text available at and the full text should open.