Statistics and Data Science Seminar
Yuan Xu
MSCS, UIC
Statistical Investigation on High Hospital Cost of Hispanic Patients
Abstract: Patients with heart disease usually stay in the hospital for certain days before they are cured and then leave the hospital. For each patient, the amount of money that he/she spends in the hospital usually is different. Some people pay more, some the other people pay less. Now we have total 143211 records of such patients. For each patient's record, we have his/her total expenditure during stay in hospital and a lot of other information such as his/her sex, age, race, length of stay in hospital, different disease history for example once having shock or not, different hospital conditions, different financial conditions for example insurance and so on. It is observed that in average Hispanic Women or Hispanic Men tend to spend more money during their stay in hospital than other race group of people. Our objective is to give a good explanation on what is the cause for the above phenomenon.
After discussion with medical doctors who provided valuable suggestions, we started with 25 suspected variables. After running the linear regressions for the total and each of the 8 sub-groups of patients, we excluded many of these variables and concentrated our investigation on 5 left variables. We applied different kinds of statistical tests on these 5 variables and found that most likely only two of them may contribute to the higher cost of Hispanic patients. By medical doctor's opinion, we excluded one of these two variables and kept the last one as our investigation result. We claim that the special behavior of Hispanic patients regarding to this variable actually causes them to pay more in the hospital.
Friday November 16, 2007 at 2:00 PM in SEO 712