What is Standard Deviation and Why Should I Care?

Linda Melillo, Director, Patient Experience/Quality and Compliance, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Cape Cod

This presentation is a crash course in patient experience statistics. Participants will come away with a solid understanding of core concepts that are the foundation of statistics that will provide useful insight into analyzing data, prioritizing goals and recognizing progress in performance improvement efforts. Key concepts will include: 1) understanding what a “population” is and how statistics describe and represent it; 2) understanding what bell curves and standard deviation represent and how they apply to patient experience data and 3) understanding correlation vs. causation.