Question: This quarter, you are asked to choose and monitor two health care organizations to complete the written assignments.

If you need guidance on choosing the publicly traded companies, for a complete list of health care?industry companies.

Health Care?Organization Criteria

• Select organizations that represent either a health care product, service, or company that is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or NASDAQ market. Make sure that your companies are competitive in nature.

- Post the organizations you have selected with their symbols and a brief summary of the organization and their missions.

- Do not use HMA or UHS organizations for this or any of the course assignments.

Resource: • Mergent is an online database that tracks companies and provides detailed information regarding financial statements, company history, news, staffing, etc. Searching the Mergent database for the health care organization will give you many of the details needed for these activities as well as for the assignments in this class.

Prompts:?• Week 1: Share the organizations' missions and what makes the companies competitive.

- Weeks 2-8: Post updates about your companies. Have they launched a new product? Have they been involved in a scandal? Have they recently been fined for lack of compliance? Are their stocks fluctuating or holding steady? If nothing has changed, compare different aspects of the companies. Is one stronger or weaker in an area than the other? Is there something on which they could work together?

Note: These are suggested topics; you may discuss any topic related to your companies.

• Week 9: Locate the financial statements of your companies. Do you observe anything that is interesting/exciting/wrong?