Ms. Dana Foster, Director of First Choice Emergency Room, a for-profit, freestanding emergency room, located in the heart of Pearland, Texas, has requested that you take a look at some specific data related to their patients. More precisely, she would like for you to gather data related to: age, gender, number of prior visits, visit times (in minutes), billed charges, payer sources, and responses to two patient satisfaction questions on a recently administered survey. After consulting with Ms. Foster, it was decided to pull a random sample of 20 patients seen at the facility during the past 15 days.
For this assignment, you're the Operations Manager for First Choice Emergency Room.
After reading the case scenario: First Choice Emergency Room, you’ll be expected to perform a descriptive analysis on the data you’ve previously gathered from 20 randomly sampled patients (view Excel spreadsheet sample), and then draft a business memorandum (view sample) narratively summarizing your findings. The memo should be directed to the attention of Ms. Foster.
To complete this task, you’ll be expected to determine which descriptive analyses make sense given the variables contained within the fictitious patient dataset. Once you’ve determined the analyses to be performed on the variables, then you will use the appropriate statistical functions, in Microsoft Excel, to perform your descriptive analyses. Finally, you’ll summarize your descriptive analyses and document this in a business memorandum to the attention of Ms. Foster.
To assist you in correctly using the statistical functions to perform your descriptive analyses, you are strongly encouraged to complete the “Check Your Understanding” problems at the end of the Excel Quick Guides 1 – 10 (pp. 8 – 27), located in the textbook: Excel Statistics: A Quick Guide.
Remember, the answers to the “Check Your Understanding” problems are provided to you in Appendix A of the textbook.
Instructor Note: After reading the Introduction to this Week, you now know that it isn’t possible to conduct measures of central tendency and dispersion on categorical variables and only limited analysis of central tendency (mode) is possible with ordinal scale data. As a result, you will be limited to computing frequencies and proportions (relative frequencies) on the categorical variables. You can do the same with the ordinal scale data, but, in addition, you will want to determine the mode(s) (if one exists).
You may want to consider your responses to the below questions; review the current literature; and watch the recommended tutorials (YouTube videos) in preparation for your narrative description of the patient sample.
1. What are the levels of measurement associated with each type of patient data (age, patient responses to survey items, number of prior visits, billed charges, gender, visit time, and payer sources)?
2. What measures of central tendency can be performed on data that are nominal scale (categorical variables), ordinal scale, interval scale, and ratio scale, if any?
3. What measures of dispersion can be performed on data that are nominal scale (categorical variables), ordinal scale, interval scale, and ratio scale, if any?
4. What descriptive analysis can be performed on categorical variables? Why?
5. Can or should the same descriptive analysis be performed on ordinal scale data as are performed on categorical variables? Why or why not?
6. What Microsoft Excel statistical functions are available to perform descriptive analysis, such as measures of central tendency and dispersion?
7. How can Microsoft Excel be used to compute frequencies and proportions?