Statistics have been employed in healthcare since the late 1800s. To reduce the death rate of British troops in Crimea, Florence Nightingale utilized a statistical technique. In 1854, Nightingale traveled to a British military camp in the suburbs of Constantinople with 38 nurses (McEnroe, 2020). She realized that the health situation in these camps was dire. Injured troops were left on the floor, and the few physicians working in a filthy atmosphere were urgently trying to handle patients with rudimentary facilities. She applied her mathematical skills to record the hospital’s death rate. According to statistics, for every thousand injured troops, six hundred died as a result of contagious and infectious illnesses. According to McDonald (2019), Nightingale noted that if reforms had been done before admitting troops to the hospital, hundreds of unnecessary fatalities might have been avoided. Her thorough records were crucial in modern-day statistical quality measurement, and she was a pioneer in the collection, tabulation, interpretation, and graphical presentation of descriptive statistics (McDonald, 2019). Her graphical data was named to depict a Coxcomb, which is now known as a pie chart.
Healthcare is a significant social, political, and economic problem in the United States. The American healthcare industry provides unique challenges for data collection, processing, and dissemination. As a result, health statistics systems have expanded significantly in tandem with the industry’s expansion. According to Moumtzoglou (2021), revolutionary medicine begins and ends with statistical analysis. Data is gathered and reported in clinical trials of new technologies and therapies to balance the advantages and dangers of the goods. Vaccines to prevent smallpox and polio were created throughout the twentieth century. These life-saving vaccines’ safety and efficacy were evaluated utilizing statistically designed clinical trials and statistical quality control throughout production. Pharmaceutical firms use comparable statistical analyses now as they develop medications for the treatment and management of a wide range of diseases.
Statistical analysis is being used by healthcare organizations to assess their performance results. To optimize efficiency, hospitals and other big provider service companies adopt data-driven, continuous quality improvement initiatives. Many hospitals, for example, use statistical process control (SPC) charts to track nurse-sensitive indicators and adverse events (Moumtzoglou, 2021). The use of SPC charts can extend beyond monitoring event rates to other sorts of measurements, such as the average duration of hospital stay or the typical cost of treating patients with a certain condition.
References
McEnroe, N. (2020). Celebrating Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary. The Lancet, 395(10235), 1475-1478.
McDonald, L. (2019). Florence Nightingale: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Moumtzoglou, A. S. (2021). Is Statistical Process Control (SPC) Obsolete? International Journal of Reliable and Quality E-Healthcare (IJRQEH), 10(2), 1-3.