We are looking for a Cost Accountant to support healthcare finance and operational decision-making through accurate cost accounting, financial analysis, data validation, and reporting.
This role will partner closely with Finance, Operations, Clinical, Revenue Cycle, and Analytics teams to maintain reliable cost and decision-support data, execute monthly costing activities, investigate variances, and translate complex financial and operational information into meaningful insights.
The ideal candidate combines strong accounting fundamentals with analytical and data skills and has experience working with healthcare financial, patient, encounter, or cost accounting data.
Key Responsibilities
- Execute and monitor monthly cost accounting and decision-support processes, ensuring accurate and timely results.
- Validate and reconcile general ledger, encounter, charge, clinical, and other financial data within the decision-support environment.
- Maintain DSS mapping and reference tables, including charge codes, payors, health plans, departments, account codes, and costing dimensions.
- Perform variance analysis, trend analysis, reasonableness testing, reconciliations, and root-cause investigations to identify and resolve data or costing issues.
- Maintain and support cost allocation methodologies, costing rules, cost components, and statistical drivers.
- Analyze cost per case, cost per unit, contribution margin, and service-line profitability to identify material trends and opportunities.
- Develop and support reports, dashboards, and data visualizations related to cost, utilization, profitability, and financial performance.
- Provide analytical support for budgeting, forecasting, business cases, site-of-service analysis, and other ad hoc decision-support requests.
- Prepare clear documentation of methodologies, assumptions, limitations, findings, and process requirements.
- Provide training and user support to Finance and operational teams on DSS tools, reports, and cost accounting results.
- Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to translate business questions into accurate and repeatable financial analyses.
- Support data governance, metric standardization, audits, process documentation, and continuous improvement initiatives.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Business, Healthcare Administration, Analytics, Information Systems, or a related field.
- At least 3 years of relevant experience in financial analysis, cost accounting, decision support, or data analysis within a healthcare environment.
- At least 1 year of experience supporting a healthcare decision-support system (DSS) or cost accounting function.
- Experience with Axiom, Strata, or comparable healthcare costing/decision-support software.
- Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel and working knowledge of Power BI.
- Strong experience with financial reconciliations, variance analysis, data validation, and issue investigation.
- Working knowledge of healthcare finance concepts, including general ledger structures, patient accounting, cost allocation, contribution margin, and service-line profitability.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, documentation, and communication skills.
- Ability to manage recurring monthly deliverables while responding effectively to ad hoc analytical requests.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with SQL or equivalent query tools for large healthcare datasets.
- Experience developing or supporting Power BI dashboards, semantic models, or executive financial reporting.
- Knowledge of hospital, ambulatory, and physician enterprise operations.
- Understanding of healthcare reimbursement and utilization concepts.
- Experience with data governance, process documentation, and standardized financial metrics/methodologies.
