Question

Why would knowing the variance and standard deviation of a distribution for a given data point be important for a Healthcare Administrator?

• What would it mean if the distribution was negatively or positively skewed? 

• Why would this information be important for a Healthcare Administrator to know?  

Answer 1

Statistics plays a very important role in bio-medical sciences.

The variance and the closely-related standard deviation are measures of how spread out a distribution is. In other words, they are measures of variability. The variance is computed as the average squared deviation of each number from its mean.

If the distribution was negatively or positively skewed means the data is not follows normal distribution. i.e., it belongs to non normal data. Non normal data gives inefficient results. It arises due to small sample size.

So in health care administration or health care research the sample should follows normal distribution. If it is normal data then only we can apply parametric tests . Parametric tests are more powerful than non parametric tests in medical research.

Hence the normal data is very important for health care administration.