RHIT Healthcare Statistics and Analytics 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A hospital has 300 staffed beds and recorded 90,000 inpatient service days in a 365-day year. What is the bed occupancy rate?
- 72.5%
- 82.2% (Correct answer)
- 90.4%
- 68.1%
Correct answer: 82.2%
Bed occupancy rate = (90,000 ÷ (300 × 365)) × 100 = (90,000 ÷ 109,500) × 100 ≈ 82.2%.
Question 2: In healthcare analytics, what does 'sensitivity' of a diagnostic test measure?
- The probability that a negative test result is truly negative
- The probability that a positive test result is truly positive
- The proportion of true positives correctly identified by the test (Correct answer)
- The proportion of the population that has the disease
Correct answer: The proportion of true positives correctly identified by the test
Sensitivity measures a test's ability to correctly identify those who have the disease (true positive rate).
Question 3: Which type of study design is considered the strongest evidence for establishing a causal relationship?
- Cross-sectional study
- Case-control study
- Randomized controlled trial (Correct answer)
- Retrospective cohort study
Correct answer: Randomized controlled trial
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) minimize bias through random assignment and are the gold standard for establishing causality.
Question 4: A hospital tracks its 30-day readmission rate. Which metric does this primarily reflect?
- Patient satisfaction with discharge education
- Quality of care and care transitions (Correct answer)
- Average length of stay efficiency
- Physician credentialing outcomes
Correct answer: Quality of care and care transitions
The 30-day readmission rate is used as a quality indicator reflecting the effectiveness of care and transitions between care settings.
Question 5: What is the primary purpose of a confidence interval in healthcare statistics?
- To calculate the exact true population parameter
- To express the range within which the true value likely falls (Correct answer)
- To determine statistical significance between two groups
- To identify outliers in a dataset
Correct answer: To express the range within which the true value likely falls
A confidence interval provides a range of values within which the true population parameter is likely to fall with a specified level of certainty.
Question 6: When calculating a hospital's infection rate, which formula is correct?
- (Number of infections / Total discharges) × 100 (Correct answer)
- (Number of infections / Number of admissions) × 100
- (Number of infections / Total inpatient service days) × 1,000
- (Number of infections / Staffed beds) × 100
Correct answer: (Number of infections / Total discharges) × 100
Hospital infection rate is calculated as the number of infections divided by total discharges, multiplied by 100.
Question 7: A correlation coefficient of -0.85 between two healthcare variables indicates:
- A weak positive relationship
- A strong positive relationship
- A weak negative relationship
- A strong negative relationship (Correct answer)
Correct answer: A strong negative relationship
A correlation coefficient of -0.85 indicates a strong negative relationship, where as one variable increases, the other tends to decrease.
RHIT Healthcare Statistics and Analytics 3
A hospital has 300 staffed beds and recorded 90,000 inpatient service days in a 365-day year.
What is the bed occupancy rate?