Healthcare is important to everyone, yet large variations in its quality have been well documented both between and within many countries. With demand and expenditure rising, it’s more crucial than ever to know how well the healthcare system and all its components – from staff member to regional network – are performing. This requires data, which inevitably differ in form and quality. It also requires statistical methods, the output of which needs to be presented so that it can be understood by whoever needs it to make decisions. Statistical Methods for Healthcare Performance Monitoring covers measuring quality, types of data, risk adjustment, defining good and bad performance, statistical monitoring, presenting the results to different audiences and evaluating the monitoring system itself. Using examples from around the world, it brings all the issues and perspectives together in a largely non-technical way for clinicians, managers and methodologists. Statistical Methods for Healthcare Performance Monitoring is aimed at statisticians and researchers who need to know how to measure and compare performance, health service regulators, health service managers with responsibilities for monitoring performance, and quality improvement scientists, including those involved in clinical audits.

Statistical Methods in Healthcare In recent years the number of innovative medicinal products and devices submitted and approved by regulatory bodies has declined dramatically. The medical product development process is no longer able to keep pace with increasing technologies, science and innovations and the goal is to develop new scientific and technical tools and to make product development processes more efficient and effective. Statistical Methods in Healthcare focuses on the application of statistical methodologies to evaluate promising alternatives and to optimize the performance and demonstrate the effectiveness of those that warrant pursuit is critical to success. Statistical methods used in planning, delivering and monitoring health care, as well as selected statistical aspects of the development and/or production of pharmaceuticals and medical devices are also addressed. With a focus on finding solutions to these challenges, this book: Provides a comprehensive, in-depth treatment of statistical methods in healthcare, along with a reference source for practitioners and specialists in health care and drug development. Offers a broad coverage of standards and established methods through leading edge techniques. Uses an integrated case study based approach, with focus on applications. Looks at the use of analytical and monitoring schemes to evaluate therapeutic performance. Features the application of modern quality management systems to clinical practice, and to pharmaceutical development and production processes. Addresses the use of modern statistical methods such as Adaptive Design, Seamless Design, Data Mining, Bayesian networks and Bootstrapping that can be applied to support the challenging new vision. Practitioners in healthcare-related professions, ranging from clinical trials to care delivery to medical device design, as well as statistical researchers in the field, will benefit from this book.

Focusing on the statistical methods most frequently used in the health care literature and featuring numerous charts, graphs, and up-to-date examples from the literature, this text provides a thorough foundation for the statistics portion of nursing and all health care research courses. All Fifth Edition chapters include new examples and new computer printouts using the latest software, SPSS for Windows, Version 12. New material on regression diagnostics has been added.

Although both public and private healthcare expenditures have been very high in the US when compared to other wealthy and industrialized nations; the quality and reach of services provided have constantly been in dispute. For that reason, improving the efficiency of healthcare services has emerged to be an important goal. However, the unpredictable and complex nature of the healthcare environments makes this goal difficult to achieve. Recently industrial engineering methods started being applied to improve hospital efficiencies. In addition, the utilization of technological advancements such as RFID based real time location systems (RTLS) in the healthcare sector provides an additional opportunity to apply industrial engineering methods to healthcare. In this thesis, a data transformation and analysis framework is developed to be employed as part of a RTLS schema in a hospital unit. This framework consists of a software agent that is capable of monitoring, analyzing and predicting the performance of a process from RTLS data. The software agent performs its task by means of several statistical methods customized for specific purposes. It can identify steady state behavior, changes in the mean and transient states such as learning curves. Its main purpose is to detect the effects of modifications on the system and forecast the future performance level. A simulation model is built to produce tracking data of entities in a hypothetical hospital unit to be fed into the software agent via a database structure. This completes the framework and enables the testing of the developed agent using realistic data. RTLSs typically suffer from accuracy issues which result in imperfect tracking data. This makes performance monitoring very infeasible or even impossible. To overcome this issue, a data cleaning algorithm is developed which can be fully integrated with the developed performance agent. The algorithm utilizes a Bayesian approach in a sliding window analysis. Testing of the data cleaning algorithm is performed for various scenarios.

The book brings together experts working in public health and multi-disciplinary areas to present recent issues in statistical methodological development and their applications. This timely book will impact model development and data analyses of public health research across a wide spectrum of analysis. Data and software used in the studies are available for the reader to replicate the models and outcomes. The fifteen chapters range in focus from techniques for dealing with missing data with Bayesian estimation, health surveillance and population definition and implications in applied latent class analysis, to multiple comparison and meta-analysis in public health data. Researchers in biomedical and public health research will find this book to be a useful reference and it can be used in graduate level classes.

Statistical Design, Monitoring, and Analysis of Clinical Trials, Second Edition concentrates on the biostatistics component of clinical trials. This new edition is updated throughout and includes five new chapters. Developed from the authors’ courses taught to public health and medical students, residents, and fellows during the past 20 years, the text shows how biostatistics in clinical trials is an integration of many fundamental scientific principles and statistical methods. The book begins with ethical and safety principles, core trial design concepts, the principles and methods of sample size and power calculation, and analysis of covariance and stratified analysis. It then focuses on sequential designs and methods for two-stage Phase II cancer trials to Phase III group sequential trials, covering monitoring safety, futility, and efficacy. The authors also discuss the development of sample size reestimation and adaptive group sequential procedures, phase 2/3 seamless design and trials with predictive biomarkers, exploit multiple testing procedures, and explain the concept of estimand, intercurrent events, and different missing data processes, and describe how to analyze incomplete data by proper multiple imputations. This text reflects the academic research, commercial development, and public health aspects of clinical trials. It gives students and practitioners a multidisciplinary understanding of the concepts and techniques involved in designing, monitoring, and analyzing various types of trials. The book’s balanced set of homework assignments and in-class exercises are appropriate for students and researchers in (bio)statistics, epidemiology, medicine, pharmacy, and public health.

Each chapter includes the research question, examples from the literature, types of data required, assumptions, details of the specific technique, and fully worked example of how to computer the statistic using SPSS. IBM SPSS18 is the latest version at time of publication. The appendices include answers to chapter review questions.