Running head: APPLICATION OF STATISTICS IN HEALTH CARE 1

Application of Statistics in Health Care

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation
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Application of Statistics in Health Care

Statistics are important in everyday aspects of life, and with the increase in technology,

the data continues to receive importance across industries. Health care is one of the most critical

sectors applying statistics in its day-to-day activities. The health care industry involves the

preservation of life, and accuracy is essential to mitigate potential risks, and consequently,

statistical relevance is needed. Hospitals, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and

other entities involved in the health provision employ statistics to determine previous trends to

assess current and future clinical events for health improvement. In this regard, statistics are

applied in health care to determine efficacy and quality of treatments, enhance communal safety,

facilitate medical research, and help leaders to make suitable decisions to promote the life and

health of patients within clinical settings.

Data obtained from clinical trials can provide important statistical overview, which is

employed to identify efficient treatments and comprehend the overall population health.

According to Aggarwal (2018), the application of statistics extends into everyday practices as

patients-doctors encounters are filled with statistics. For example, an individual at an ER room

with chest pain can be diagnosed with several potential conditions. Therefore, a professional

physician has to combine several aspects of clinical and historical findings to select the most

likely disease and match these diagnoses with predictive values, specificity, and sensitivity.

Every step involved requires the employment of statistical theories such as the Bayes and

probability principles (Aggarwal, 2018). Statistical data is also useful to determine the risk

factors of various diseases and methods of lowering such risks. As a result, physicians can

develop the best intervention strategies that can improve the quality of treatment for patients.

Statistics also help to create a robust healthcare system and better prognosis, which can be

achieved by anomaly detection through IoT data analytics (Ukil, Bandyoapdhyay, Puri, & Pal,
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2016). Statistics are also vital in health promotion for the communities. For instance, testing of

vaccines relies on statistical data to allow healthcare professionals to draw accurate inferences

and determine the most effective drug to be administered to a population (Aggarwal, 2018).

Statistical data that is usually based on race, age, and gender plays a significant role in health

care administrators by providing the most suitable risk prevention strategies to offer to different

groups to mitigate the risk of disease progression. In this regard, the application of statistics is

crucial in enhancing the quality of treatment and determining appropriate medical interventions

for populations.

Statistical information is highly utilized in medical research for evidence-based practice,

which is a critical aspect of clinical applications. As per Barkan (2015), statistics is a

fundamental tool that links the multiplicity of possible observations with abstract concepts of

natural histories, clinical entities, and risks. Clinical and biological entities are usually complex

and dynamic multidimensional processes. Therefore, all research commences by choosing

particular aspects of the processes and physical objects, which are used to operationalize the said

abstract concepts into defined measurements (Barkan, 2015). Statistics is employed to specify

these operationalizations and evaluate processes and features, which are shared within different

collections of observations. It is noteworthy that clinical studies and medical research are only

effective when the sample size is big enough to provide the studies with a significant chance of

discovering the correlation as hypothesized by researchers (Barkan, 2015). Health care

professionals also need to learn and understand the statistics from empirical studies to implement

evidence-based practices for everyday use in clinical settings. Therefore, statistics are important

in conducting medial research to develop associations, which can be employed by clinicians in

evidence-based practice.
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Statistical knowledge is a key aspect of my day-to-day operations as a health care

professional. Aggarwal (2018) argues that medicine is constantly evolving and as new diseases

and diagnostic techniques arise, one needs to be conversant with contemporary literature, which

reeds statistical literacy. In my work area, most data are obtained from government websites and

database such as MEDLINE and the NIH. I utilize these resources because of the wide coverage

and reliability since the government has access to new information every day from hospitals and

health agencies across the country. Statistical information is also obtained from peer-reviewed

literature published on websites such as PubMed, which are known for their reliability and

extensive research. This knowledge is utilized in exploring the trends in medical treatments and

techniques from different parts of the country and sometimes from the rest of the world. Such

information is crucial in helping us innovate and select the most appropriate interventions to be

used on patients with different needs. Moreover, statistical information helps in decision-making,

especially with diseases that manifest variably on different patients. Data from previous research

and clinical practices guides me to the type of measures that have yielded effective results in

previous trials. Inarguably, statistical knowledge benefits my day-to-day operations as it provides

a chance for selecting efficient interventions and care techniques.

Overall, health care is highly dependent on statistics because of the benefits accrued from

their association. Statistical data helps to improve the quality of care and promotes the efficacy

of treatment for both individual interventions and population control management. Statistical

information is also required in clinical research, which is necessary to improve evidence-based

practice. Typically, statistics can be obtained from government databases and scholarly studies,

and the information obtained is useful in day-to-day operations and decision-making.

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References

Aggarwal, R. (2018). Statistical literacy for healthcare professionals: Why is it

important?. Annals of cardiac anaesthesia, 21(4), 349.

Barkan, H. (2015). Statistics in clinical research: Important considerations. Annals of Cardiac

Anaesthesia, 18(1), 74.

Ukil, A., Bandyoapdhyay, S., Puri, C., & Pal, A. (2016, March). IoT healthcare analytics: The

importance of anomaly detection. In 2016 IEEE 30th international conference on

advanced information networking and applications (AINA) (pp. 994-997). IEEE.