¶ … Healing with Statistics There are numerous ways in which statistics are used in a standard healthcare organization. Statistical measurements and analyses are used to track patient costs and hospital/healthcare organization expenses, to determine appropriate medication levels, to assign work staff and maintain proper human resource levels, and for a wide variety of other applications and areas of concern. In many ways, the quality and the cost-effectiveness of care provided by a typical healthcare organization is directly related to the quality of the statistical data the organization collects and assesses. Without such statistical analysis and manipulation, direct healthcare providers as well as administrators within the healthcare organizations would be left with little more than anecdotal evidence and subjective perceptions and judgments when it came to making decisions for patient health and/or organizational fitness, thus the importance of statistics in such organizations is difficult to overstate.

The most basic level of analysis using statistics is in the development of descriptive statistics, which provide information about a particular data set but do not allow for conclusions to be drawn about elements outside of this particular set of observed data (Lund, 2010; Hill, 2012). Elements...

Even at this basic level, these statistics can be utilized to make important decisions.
There are other ways in which descriptive statistics could be used in healthcare organizations, but often aren't for a variety of reasons. While it might be enormously beneficial in terms of cost control and efficacy improvement to develop descriptive statistics for the number of nurse-hours required for each case of a specific ailment or patient type, conducting such observational research could also be seen as very time consuming and inefficient. In this case, it would seem that the benefits -- enabling more appropriate and effective staffing levels, reducing cost and improving care -- would outweigh the complications, but many healthcare organizations do not see things this way. Descriptive statistics could also be used to collect more patient information to offer more tailored services, but even on a voluntary basis attempts at collecting such information is often seen…