Statistics for Health Care Management and Administration

Working with Excel

John F. Kros, David A. Rosenthal

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118712764
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Salud pública, administración y atención

The must-have statistics guide for students of health services

Statistics for Health Care Management and Administration is a unique and invaluable resource for students of health care administration and public health. The book introduces students to statistics within the context of health care, focusing on the major data and analysis techniques used in the field. All hands-on instruction makes use of Excel, the most common spreadsheet software that is ubiquitous in the workplace. This new third edition has been completely retooled, with new content on proportions, ANOVA, linear regression, chi-squares, and more, Step-by-step instructions in the latest version of Excel and numerous annotated screen shots make examples easy to follow and understand.

Familiarity with statistical methods is essential for health services professionals and researchers, who must understand how to acquire, handle, and analyze data. This book not only helps students develop the necessary data analysis skills, but it also boosts familiarity with important software that employers will be looking for.

• Learn the basics of statistics in the context of Excel
• Understand how to acquire data and display it for analysis
• Master various tests including probability, regression, and more
• Turn test results into usable information with proper analysis

Statistics for Health Care Management and Administration gets students off to a great start by introducing statistics in the workplace context from the very beginning.

Part 1

1. Statistics and Excel
2. Excel as a Statistical Tool
3. Data Acquisition: Sampling and Data Preparation
4. Data Display: Descriptive Presentation, Excel Graphing Capability
5. Basic Concepts of Probability
6. Measures of Central Tendency and Dispersion: Data Distributions

Chapter 1
Statistics and Excel

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Learning Objectives

• Understand how this book differs from other statistics texts
• Understand how knowledge of statistics may be beneficial to health policy or health administration professionals
• Understand the “big picture” with regard to the use of statistics for health policy and administration
• Understand the definitions of the following terms:
  • Populations and samples
  • Random and nonrandom samples
  • Types of random samples
  • Variables, independent and dependent
• Identify the five separate statistical tests: chi-square test, the t test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), regression analysis, and Logit

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Statistics is a subject that for many people is pure tedium. For others, it is more likely to be anathema. Still others find statistics interesting, even stimulating, but they are usually in the minority in any group.

This book is premised on the recognition that in the health care industry, as indeed among people in any industry or discipline, there are at least these three different views of statistics, and that any statistics class is likely to be made up more of the first two groups than the last one. This book provides an introduction to statistics in health policy and administration that is relevant, useful, challenging, and informative.

1.1 How This Book Differs from Other Statistics Texts

The primary difference between this statistics text and most others is that this text uses Microsoft Excel as the tool for carrying out statistical operations and understanding statistical concepts as they relate to health policy and health administration issues. This is not to say that no other statistics texts use Excel. Levine, Stephan, Szabat (2013) have produced a very useable text, Statistics for Managers Using Microsoft Excel. But their book focuses almost exclusively on non–health-related topics. We agree that the closer the applications of statistics are to students' real-life interests and experiences, the more effective students will be in understanding and using statistics. Consequently, this book focuses its examples entirely on subjects that should be immediately familiar to people in the health care industry.

Excel, which most people know as a spreadsheet program for creating budgets, comparing budgeted and expended amounts, and generally fulfilling accounting needs, is also a very powerful statistical tool. Books that do not use Excel for teaching statistics generally leave the question of how to carry out the actual statistical operations in the hands of the student or the instructor. It is often assumed that relatively simple calculations, such as means, standard deviations, and t tests, will be carried out on paper or with a calculator. For more complicated calculations, the assumption is usually that a dedicated statistical package, such as SAS, SPSS, STATA, or SYSTAT, will be used. There are at least two problems with this approach that we hope to overcome in this book. First, calculations done on paper, or even those done with a calculator, can make even simple statistical operations overly tedious and prone to errors in arithmetic. Second, because dedicated statistical packages are designed for use rather than for teaching, they often obscure the actual process of calculating the statistical results, thereby hindering students' understanding of both how the statistic is calculated and what the statistic means.

In general, this is not true of Excel. It is true that when using this book, a certain amount of time must be devoted to the understanding of how to use Excel as a statistical tool. But once that has been done, Excel makes the process of carrying out the statistical procedures under consideration relatively clear and transparent. The student should end up with a better understanding of what the statistic means, through an understanding of how it is calculated, and not simply come away with the ability to get a result by entering a few commands into a statistical package. This is not to say that Excel cannot be used to eliminate many of the steps needed to get particular statistical results. A number of statistical tests and procedures are available as add-ins to Excel. However, using Excel as a relatively powerful—yet transparent—calculator can lead to a much clearer understanding of what a statistic means and how it may be used.

1.2 Statistical Applications in Health Policy and Health Administration

When teaching statistics to health policy and health administration students, we often encounter the same question: “All these statistics are fine, but how do they apply to anything I am concerned with?” The question not only is a reasonable one, but also points directly to one of the most important and difficult challenges for a statistics teacher, a statistics class, or a statistics text. How can it be demonstrated that these statistics have any real relevance to anything that the average person working in the health care industry ever needs to know or do?

To work toward a better understanding of why and when the knowledge of statistics may be useful to someone working in health policy or health administration, we've selected six examples of situations in which statistical applications can play a role. All six of these examples were inspired by real problems faced by students in statistics classes, and they ...