Question

RESPONSE/ANSWER IN PREVIOUS POST HAS BEEN USED IN COURSE, NEW RESPONSE/ANSWER TO QUESTION NEEDED PLEASE

Pam is a healthcare administration leader for a large network of hospitals and health service centers that is attempting to predict future healthcare utilization at their centers over the next 5 years. She obtains data regarding patient use across the hospital network and health service centers and projects forward over the next 5 years to determine which areas might experience continued growth. After applying her time series model, she is able to demonstrate that, indeed, the hospital network and health service centers will experience significant growth. As she prepares to share her results and findings with the board, she also considers advocating for the development of a new regional health service center to fill one of the areas that will experience the most growth according to her forecast projections.

As a current or future healthcare administration leader, you may be asked to assess strategic planning and decision making using time series analysis.

By Day 3

Post a description of some variables that you might evaluate using time series in your health services organization or one with which you are familiar.

Then, explain what types of models might be most appropriate to measure, and analyze these variables.

Be specific, and provide examples.

Answer 1

Some of the variables to be considered in a healthcare administration research can be broadly classified into staff outcomes, organizational outcomes and client outcomes. The common independent variables used in the staff outcomes section include nurse status, clinical decisions autonomy, medical records, unit level decisions, assignment patterns, accountability and organizational culture. The primary variable in staff outcome is job satisfaction that affects the independent variables and influencing staff outcome as a whole. The various factors contributing to the healthcare staff job satisfaction are considered for the study. Staff job satisfaction has many dependent variables like pay, promotion, time at work, bonus, incentive, recognition, rewards, gifts, allowances etc.
In the organizational outcome, the variables include turnover rates, sales, profits, tax, various costs incurred in providing healthcare. A healthcare service provider or organization spends money on personnel costs, administration costs, maintenance costs of health care facility, infrastructure and health equipment, service costs etc.
In the client or patient outcome, variables like functional status, health status, length of stay and utilization of healthcare service are considered. Patient information stored in the form of EHR medical records is used as variables for the research study. The patient information forms the base of the research study and in the above case, the researcher gathers patient data from the hospital and hospital network to conduct time series analysis to predict the five-year growth trends. Hence client or patient outcome based variables are considered the most crucial for the research study.
Time series analysis is the model chosen by the researcher in the above case to analyze the data obtained from the hospital network. This can be integrated with a linear regression model to identify the key areas that fuel the growth of the hospital based on data analysis and predict the growth of the hospital in the next five years.