Press Ganey Associates, Inc, releases the Hospital Pulse Report: Patient Perspec
ID: 3127331 • Letter: P
Question
Press Ganey Associates, Inc, releases the Hospital Pulse Report: Patient Perspectives on American Health Care yearly. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) reform mandates transparency of and reimbursement based on quality of care and patient satisfaction data. So the question is, has this mandate improved the quality of care in hospitals?
The following data show the results of patient satisfaction surveys from 6 hospitals before and after the ACA mandate for in-patient hospital care.
Hospital Patient Satisfaction Before the ACA Mandate Patient Satisfaction After the ACA Mandate
A 84.3 85.6
B 85.3 86.6
C 85.4 85.8
D 84.5 86.1
E 84.6 85.3
F 84.9 84.9
. a. At the 0.05 level, can we say that in-patient hospital care has improved since the mandate, at least as measured by patient satisfaction surveys? Show work as stated in the quiz directions.
1. The hypothesis
2. The critical value
3. The test statistic
4. The decision you made, why you made it, and how does it answer the original question.
Explanation / Answer
Here are the differences:
1.3
1.3
0.4
1.6
0.7
0
Let ud = u2 - u1.
Formulating the null and alternative hypotheses,
Ho: ud <= 0
Ha: ud > 0 [HYPOTHESES]
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At level of significance = 0.01
As we can see, this is a right tailed test.
As df = n - 1 = 5
Then the critical value of t is
tcrit = + 2.570581836
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Calculating the standard deviation of the differences (third column):
s = 0.621520618
Thus, the standard error of the difference is sD = s/sqrt(n):
sD = 0.25373473
Calculating the mean of the differences (third column):
XD = 0.883333333
As t = [XD - uD]/sD, where uD = the hypothesized difference = 0 , then
t = 3.481326084 [TEST STATISTIC]
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As t > 2.57058, we REJECT THE NULL HYPOTHESIS. [DECISION]
Hence, there is significant evidence at 0.05 level that in-patient hospital care has improved since the mandate, at least as measured by patient satisfaction surveys. [CONCLUSION]