How Ethical and Efficient is our Healthcare system?
Health care is a very controversial topic in the United States. During the pandemic we saw how truly valuable a hospital bed is. This is the hospital’s one limiting resource. Let me put this in perspective in a few different ways. If you are looking at it from a humanity lens and the hospital has 150 beds, and the hospital is full, you cannot help the 151st person. If you are looking at it from a revenue perspective, you are turning away your 151st customer.
I conducted thorough analysis utilizing data from 130 hospitals in the United States. I used descriptive analysis to determine what the distribution of time spent in the hospital looked like. This data was taken over a 10 year period (1999-2008). I retrieved the data from UCI Machine Learning Repository: Diabetes 130-US hospitals for years 1999-2008 Data Set
Using descriptive analysis, I was able to answer several questions about how truly efficient and ethical our hospitals are. These questions included: Do most of our hospital patients stay over 7 days? Does ethnicity play a factor in length of hospital stay? Do patients stay in the hospital as long as projections are showing?