Healthcare Statistics 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:

Describe the application of statistics in health care. Specifically discuss its significance to quality, safety, health promotion, and leadership.
Consider your organization or specialty area 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.

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

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

Healthcare Statistics

Healthcare statistics offer the empirical data and estimates that facilitate decision making with regards to resource allocation, care approaches and research focus among other topics. It helps with making decisions in the face of uncertainty. In fact, statistics refers to the quantitative data and its classification in accordance with hypothesis tests, probability theory and other data analysis methods. Healthcare statistics includes any data related to healthcare, which includes health systems, health service coverage, risk factors, insurance coverage, workforce compensation, morbidity, and mortality. Through identifying statistical trails and trends, the health care providers can monitor the conditions of a population and compare them to others such as international, national, state and regional trends. In addition, the statistics play a key role in advocacy for health issues, and monitoring and evaluating health programs (Gibson, 2019; Scott & Mazhindu, 2014). The present paper discusses the use of healthcare statistics.

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Application of statistics in health care

Avoiding patient harm, safety, quality, health promotion and leadership are intrinsic to the work of medical personnel. In fact, the provision of health care is expected to always do good and do no harm. However, contemporary medicine struggles with realizing this objective with many patients experiencing preventable harm while hospitalized (from hospital acquired infections, falls, wrong diagnosis, wrong medication/treatment and so on) with some of them dying from the injuries. There is a gap in health care culture, and this gap is mainly resultant of how the health systems use health statistics to understand failures in the health care system and what needs to be improved. Healthcare statistics helps in addressing the gap by integrating medical, operational, financial and other data to result in a consolidated approach to medical analytics that is predictive and actionable. It facilitates efforts to close the loop between action and information. This helps in improving the status of health care quality, safety, health promotion, and leadership. Healthcare Statistics Essay Paper  To be more precise, healthcare statistics facilitates efforts to integrate data thus supporting efforts to make data-driven decisions (Scott & Mazhindu, 2014).

Healthcare statistics presents incisive analytical tools that improve outcomes. The analytical tools leverage integrated machine learning, predictive analytics, operational data, cost data, clinical data, and more to address weaknesses in health care delivery while enabling improvement. In addition, health statistics supports health care improvement with fully integrated, proactive and reactive capabilities. Firstly, it presents full integration capabilities by integrating quality, safety, health promotion and leadership measures across the health care system and workflow tools thus enabling improvements across the care continuum. This ensures that improvements are not fragmented and isolated within the units/departments so that they only impact a few people, but are implemented across the whole organization to impact many people. Also, it allows stakeholders to have access to data applications thus making them true partners in health care delivery. Secondly, it presents proactive capabilities that make the information accessible and actionable by availing hard-to-find protocols and procedures with easy reach of users and suggesting intervention. For instance, the statistics could show that a patient is at risk of developing pressure ulcers and send reminders to the caregiver to observe safe skincare practices and regularly rotate the patient to reduce the risk of developing pressure ulcers. Thirdly, it presents reactive capabilities by offering automated triggers that allow health care tools to identify and react to situations while notifying medical personnel thereby adding a layer of critical thinking (Bauer, 2017). In this respect, the application of healthcare statistics is significant to quality, safety, health promotion, and leadership.

Obtaining, using and applying statistical data in decision-making

Health statistics are obtained from interactions within the health care environment to include medical notes, salaries data, inventory, publications, and so on. Four types of statistical data are collected. The first type is costs, which offers information on how much health care costs and why. For instance, showing that a prescription drug costs $400 while patients pay $250 because the government subsidizes the drug costs by paying the balance of $150. The second type is care, which explores how health care is delivered to treat illness and disease among the different patient populations that need this services. For example, showing how different treatment protocols perform in terms of treatment efficacy. The third type is conditions, which assesses how often and how badly a disease or illness impacts the patient population. For instance, reporting the specific months in which a larger number of patients seek treatment for flu. The fourth type is correlates, which measures the protective and risk factors that impact health. For example, measuring how age increases the risk of developing a specific disease (Wicker & Browning, 2020). The collected data is used to assess the quality and safety of health care, see the impact of policy changes, track and monitor diseases, and understand the risk factors for a population. In this case, statistics is perceived as a form of facts or evidence that supports a conclusion. The statistics is applied in evidence-informed decision making, an approach intended to ensure that every decision made is informed by the best available evidence. It facilitates efforts to reasonably, judiciously, explicitly and conscientiously use the best available evidence in decision making with regards to promoting population health and providing health care. Besides that, the statistical analysis determines the value of the evidence in supporting conclusions drawn as not all statistical data are equally convincing in the support of a conclusion (Bauer, 2017).

References

Bauer, J. (2017). Statistical Analysis for Decision Makers in Healthcare: Understanding and Evaluating Critical Information in Changing Times (2^nd ed.). CRC Press.

Gibson, E. (2019). Leadership in Statistics: Increasing Our Value and Visibility. The American Statistician, 73(2), 109-116. https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2017.1336484

Scott, I. & Mazhindu, D. (2014). Statistics for Healthcare Professionals: An Introduction (2^nd ed.). SAGE Publications Inc.

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