Scenario You have been hired as a consultant by a large hospital chain

Scenario

You have been hired as a consultant by a large hospital chain. As part of its expansion plan, the organization wants to open a new hospital in a small- to medium-sized town (with a population of 10,000–50,000). Previously, senior management hired a market research firm to do an initial feasibility analysis. The firm presented the management team with two options:

The hospital’s vice president of operations and finance has tasked you with doing an in-depth analysis to determine which of the two options will be the most profitable, given the expense range of $55–$75 million. The hospital has provided you with a data set that contains data about admissions, personnel, and hospital beds, and attributes of the data such as outpatient visits, births, total expense, and census information.

Your work here in Phase One is to do a current trend analysis, which will help you test your initial hypothesis as to which size facility is most profitable. You will use the work here as a foundation for Phase Two (in Milestone Two).

Prompt

For this assignment, you will analyze the data from the Hospital Data Set and identify trends and patterns in the current operations. You will submit a written current state analysis report. You will also create multiple charts to present the descriptive analysis you performed. To organize this information, you will create and submit a Data Analysis Workbook in Excel. For this milestone, you will add three sheets to the workbook, and you’ll add more as you complete your Milestone Two assignment.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

1. Descriptive Statistics: Create an Excel file and title it Data Analysis Workbook. Within your workbook, create a sheet titled P1_Descriptive Analysis. Present descriptive statistics (mean, median, standard deviation, and range) in a table for four attributes from the data set.
2. Analyze the current hospital data to identify trends and patterns in hospital admissions and costs.
3. Outliers: Identify any outliers that you see and explain how they have an impact on the overall admission and expense trends. Outliers are the data points that can have an impact on your averages and basic descriptive analysis.
4. Analysis: Form and explain your initial hypothesis based on your analysis of the charts and trends in Excel.