The use of statistical tools to measure performance improvement

As a current or future health care administration leader, you may be required to apply the use of statistical tools to measure performance improvement in your health services organization. As you have examined throughout this course, there are a variety of statistical tools at your disposal that will allow you to enhance your decision-making skills to enhance effective health care delivery in your health services organization. The statistical tools explored this week, such as chi-square, ANOVA, and regression, are all useful in helping you identify the association between certain causes of inefficiency as well as identify those performance improvement initiatives that have been most effective in reducing such inefficiencies.

For this Discussion, review the resources for this week regarding these techniques and think about how your health services organization, or one with which you are familiar, might use these techniques in practice.

NOTE: For this Discussion, you will be required to run the SPSS software platform.

Post, a brief description of one of the methods presented in the resources for this week and explain how it might be used as part of a performance improvement initiative within your health services organization or an organization with which you are familiar. Be specific and provide examples. Using fictitious data, demonstrate the use of this statistical method and interpret all results. What are other statistical techniques that might be useful for your example?

Research By Design (2017, April 17). 12-6 One Way ANOVA in SPSS. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com

Research By design (2017, April 17). 14-5 Simple linear regression in SPSS. Retrieved from https://ww.youtube.com

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Sample Answer

One statistical tool that can be used to measure performance improvement in health care organizations is the chi-square test. The chi-square test is a non-parametric test that can be used to compare two or more categorical variables. For example, you could use the chi-square test to compare the distribution of patients by age group before and after a performance improvement initiative.

To demonstrate how the chi-square test can be used, let’s say that you work for a hospital that has implemented a new patient satisfaction initiative. You want to know if the initiative has been effective in improving patient satisfaction. You collect data on patient satisfaction before and after the initiative, and you want to see if there is a statistically significant difference in the distribution of patient satisfaction scores.

Full Answer Section

To run the chi-square test in SPSS, you would first need to create a contingency table. The contingency table would show the distribution of patient satisfaction scores before and after the initiative. Once you have created the contingency table, you can run the chi-square test by selecting Analyze > Descriptive Statistics > Crosstabs.

The results of the chi-square test would show whether there is a statistically significant difference in the distribution of patient satisfaction scores before and after the initiative. If the p-value is less than 0.05, then you can conclude that there is a statistically significant difference in the distribution of patient satisfaction scores.

In this example, the p-value is 0.02, which is less than 0.05. Therefore, you can conclude that there is a statistically significant difference in the distribution of patient satisfaction scores before and after the initiative. This suggests that the patient satisfaction initiative has been effective in improving patient satisfaction.

Other statistical techniques that might be useful for this example include ANOVA and regression. ANOVA can be used to compare the mean patient satisfaction scores before and after the initiative. Regression can be used to identify the factors that are most likely to influence patient satisfaction.

The chi-square test, ANOVA, and regression are just a few of the statistical tools that can be used to measure performance improvement in health care organizations. By using these tools, health care administrators can make informed decisions about how to improve the quality of care that they provide.

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