Application of Statistics in Health Care Essay Paper

Statistical application and the interpretation of data is important in health care. Review the statistical concepts covered in this topic. In a 750-1,000 word paper, discuss the significance of statistical application in health care. Include the following:

1. Describe the application of statistics in health care. Specifically discuss its significance to quality, safety, health promotion, and leadership.

2. Consider your organization or specialty area (Specialty area – Working with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities) and how you utilize statistical knowledge. Discuss how you obtain statistical data, how statistical knowledge is used in day-to-day operations and how you apply it or use it in decision making.

Three peer-reviewed, scholarly or professional references are required.
Please provide an introduction and conclusion.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.

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Application of Statistics in Health Care

Statistics, a branch of mathematics that is concerned with collecting, organizing, analyzing, interpreting and presenting data, is important for the pursuit of all medical sciences (including nursing) and medical research. Statistics and health care have close relationships with statistics helping medical professional to deal with biological systems and their inherent variability (Aggarwal, 2018). For instance, if different members of the same family are exposed to the same pathogen under similar circumstances then it would not be surprising for their responses to widely vary – from fatal and severe disease, through asymptomatic infection to even no infection. If a vaccine is administered to the family members before being exposed to the pathogen and they end up not developing the disease except for one family member who develops the disease, then this could be considered a variability that makes it difficult to determine whether or not the vaccine offered effective protection. Instead, there would be a need to present the vaccine to several more families and compare the disease incidence against families that did not receive the vaccine before applying statistics to determine if the noted differences are resultant of chance. This shows that statistics is useful in health research for drawing reasonably accurate differences despite the uncertainties inherent in biological systems. In addition, statistics is useful in clinical practice for conducting diagnosis with performance characteristics such as predictive, specificity and sensitivity values (Aggarwal, 2018). The present paper highlights the significance of statistics to health care with a focus on explaining how statistics helps with understanding aspects of health care.  Application of Statistics in Health Care Essay Paper

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1. Describe the application of statistics in health care. Specifically discuss its significance to quality, safety, health promotion, and leadership.

Health care makes use of statistics to aid in the decision-making process, with specific focus on pursuing goals of improving quality, safety, health promotion and leadership. Statistics provides evidence and information on treatment efficacy, individual patient applicability and costs among a range of statistical offerings that include health care utilization and cost, medical expenditure spending, and safety net monitoring. In fact, statistics aggregates multifaceted and reliable health information from several authoritative sources to illuminate experiences, validate evidence-based practices, and offer comparisons in health care outcomes and delivery. In fact, statistics guides health care decision makers by presenting descriptions of specific population samples. It summarizes costs, efficacy and utility. Increasingly, health care organizations are making use of statistics to measure performance outcomes, implementing data-driven continuous improvement initiatives to maximize efficiency. Also, the statistics helps with gauging overall population wellbeing and health (Wicker & Browning, 2020).

Firstly, statistics helps with quality management by reporting on key health care quality indicators thereby helping to identifying areas of improvement. This is particularly important for matching interventions with outcomes and identifying the best health care approaches (Dash et al., 2019). Secondly, statistics helps with improving the safety of medical personnel and patients. It does this by identifying data trends in error occurrences and helping to optimize interventions (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017). For instance, statistics can identify optimized patient-nurse ratios for each department and help to improve safety without significantly increasing costs. Thirdly, statistics help with improving health promotion by linking specific behaviors with health outcomes (Hayat et al., 2017). For example, showing that smoking has a link with cancer development so that smokers are encouraged to avoid the behavior in order not to develop cancer. Finally, statistics helps with leadership by identifying the implications of each decision so that the decision-makers are able to accurately predict the implications of each decision (Dash et al., 2019). In this respect, health care statistics helps to improve quality, safety, health promotion, and leadership.

2. Consider your organization or specialty area (Specialty area – Working with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities) and how you utilize statistical knowledge. Discuss how you obtain statistical data, how statistical knowledge is used in day-to-day operations and how you apply it or use it in decision making.

The specialty practice area focuses on working with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It makes use of statistics to determine personnel assignments, specifically how many nurses should be allocated to each shift at any given time of the day and day of the week. In addition, it determines how the personnel should be assigned in terms of experiences, skills, knowledge and competence levels. Using nurse-patient ratios developed from research evidence and consultations with stakeholders, the facility is able to set nurse-patient ratios to ensure the delivery of quality and safe care. The statistical data is obtained from the personnel department that keeps a rooster of all the personnel available to every department in the organization with clear indications of specialties, experiences, competencies, and skills. The collected data is then used to create personnel shift plans detailing when each nurse should be at work and ensuring that the skills mix meets the anticipated need without compromising care quality and safety, and remaining within the budgeted personnel costs. In this respect, the organization makes use of statistics to facilitate decision-making on how to assign nurse personnel to the different shifts.

References

Aggarwal, R. (2018). Statistical Literacy for Healthcare Professionals: Why is It Important? Annals of Cardiac Anaesthesia, 21(4), 349-350. https://doi.org/10.4103/aca.ACA_177_18

Alotaibi, Y., & Federico, F. (2017). The impact of health information technology on patient safety. Saudi Medical Journal, 38(12), 1173-1180. https://doi.org/10.15537/smj.2017.12.20631

Dash, S., Shakyawar, S., Sharma, M., & Kaushik, S. (2019). Big data in healthcare: management, analysis and future prospects. Journal of Big Data, 6, Article number 54. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-019-0217-0

Hayat, M., Powell, A., Johnson, T., & Cadwell, B. (2017). Statistical methods used in the public health literature and implications for training of public health professionals. PLoS ONE, 12(6), e0179032. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179032

Wicker, Z. & Browning, B. (2020). Visualizing Health Care Statistics: A Data Mining Approach (2^nd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.  Application of Statistics in Health Care Essay Paper