Quantitative Methods Mid-Term

You wish to start a savings plan for your newborn child's college education. To do so, you plan to invest $4000 each year into an account which grows at 4.5% annually. What will be the value of your account in 18 years?

$107,420

Describe how quantitative methods fit into the skill sets of a health services manager.

1. The ingenuous act of counting plays an significant part of healthcare management, it being a "screener" or first indicator of a need for intervention. Instances of use include: a. Number and types of test performed b. Number of patients coming to the emergency room during flu season 2. Number of beds occupancy necessary for the hospital to break even and stay financially viable. 3. Using forecasting techniques to project emergency room visits during hunting season 4. Using basic statistics such as measures of essential tendency (means, medians and modes), dispersion or spread of the data (ranges and standard deviations) and scatter plots or line charts to discover questionable data points(Lewis, McGrath, & Seidel, 2011).

How many years would it take you to triple your investment if your money compounds monthly at an annual rate of 5%?

264.21 months or about 22 years

All decisions included on the flow chart must be able to be answered as either a _______ or no.

yes

Which assumption would guide decision making when attempting to forecast the impact of a new government regulation?

Cause and effect

The correct test to use to examine the relationship between two continuous, but different variables is:

Correlation

A Chi-square test relates the differences between two means.

False

Non-analytic forecasting methods are naïve and therefore unusable.

False

The null hypothesis used to test whether a regression line (model) may be used or not is:

Ho: The slope is zero

The appropriate graph for time series data is:

Line graph

The quantitative rationale for choosing between forecasting methods is known as:

Mean absolute deviation

Your investment has grown from an initial deposit of $400 to $1500. The investment pays 9.5% interest annually. How many years have you had your money invested?

N=14.56 years or rounded to 14.6 years

Consider the following list of hospital division operating revenues for the past five years: $200,000, $315,000, $385,000, $415,000, $427,000. If the amount in year five was found to actually be $515,000, what would this do to the median 5-year revenue amount?

Nothing, the median is a robust resistant measure

______________ are used to compare the difference between means from two groups.

T-test

The mean absolute deviation of the regression forecast is determined through what mechanism?

The absolute average of the regression residuals

Average percent change as a forecasting method relies on what primary assumption?

The past predicts the future

A p-value is the specific level of probability where the null hypothesis is (either) rejected or not rejected.

True

A pie chart should only be used when the slices are relatable portions of a whole.

True

Confidence intervals are used in regression forecasting to place ranges around linear point estimates going into the future.

True

General system flowcharts are used to describe and then analyze the operation of a system. To use this technique requires that the operation is __________ and has a formal start and stop point.

complex

All lines on a flow chart have arrowheads that indicate _______ and sequence.

flow

As the number of compounding periods increases, all else being equal, the future value of any given sum of money ________.

increases

Fill in the blanks concerning the four primary attributes or rules used in preparing a flow chart. A flow chart flows from top to bottom and from left to _________.

right