Journal for healthcare quality : official publication of the National Association for Healthcare Quality
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Healthcare quality improvement professionals need to understand and use inferential statistics to interpret sample data from their organizations. In quality improvement and healthcare research studies all the data from a population often are not available, so investigators take samples and make inferences about the population by using inferential statistics. ⋯ A histogram is a graph that displays the frequency distribution for a continuous variable. The article also demonstrates how to calculate the mean, median, standard deviation, and variance for a continuous variable.
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Healthcare quality improvement (QI) studies are systematic analyses of processes and outcomes. As such, they meet one of the federal regulatory criteria defining research. ⋯ Therefore, to err on the side of patients' rights, any studies involving human subjects or human data must be approved by federally mandated institutional review boards (IRBs) or their designees. This article explores federal regulations to protect research subjects, levels of IRB review, and strategies to simplify the IRB approval process and discusses implications for QI studies.
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Healthcare quality improvement professionals need to understand and use inferential statistics to interpret sample data from their organizations. In quality improvement and healthcare research studies all the data from a population often are not available, so investigators take samples and make inferences about the population by using inferential statistics. ⋯ This article, Part 3, describes standard error and margin of error for a continuous variable and how they are calculated from the sample size and standard deviation of a sample. The article then demonstrates how the standard error and margin of error are used to calculate the confidence interval for estimating a population mean based on a sample mean.
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Sr. Mary Jean Ryan, Franciscan Sister of Mary, is president/chief executive officer of SSM Health Care (SSMHC), one of the largest Catholic healthcare systems in the United States, with 23,000 employees and 5,000 affiliated physicians serving in 21 hospitals and 3 nursing homes. This year SSMHC became the first healthcare recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. ⋯ She serves on a number of healthcare and local, state, and national boards. She received a master's degree in hospital and health administration from Xavier University in Cincinnati. She is a nurse and has been a Franciscan Sister of Mary for more than 40 years.
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As a result of standards published by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, there is new emphasis in the area of pain management. This pilot study was conducted to assess the visibility of pain management through documentation; the effect of implementing new tools (forms) was measured to determine whether they improve documentation of pain management assessment and intensity. A retrospective chart review was conducted to determine presence of this documentation. This study found that it is possible to improve the quality of information related to pain assessment through the development of explicit documentation tools.