The attached file provides data from a healthcare data warehouse query that looked at transactional data in a hospital over a two-year period. The display provides for a number of transactions of a given type charted by the time-of-day for each transaction noted in the hospital’s data warehouse.

he scenario in the data displayed involves all lab test orders (page 1) and lab test results (page 2) recorded at the hospital over a two year period. Data like this can be used to understand and forecast past and future demand for inpatient services and capacity, as well as supporting certain patient and patient population analytics.

Consider what you see in the data display, and reflect on whether it looks exactly the way you might have expected it to look. (Hint: It doesn’t!) Discuss why this is so, what you think might be causing the differences from expectation, and what you think might be issues in trying to use this data to conduct analytics around this or related transaction data in the hospital.

Posting Instructions

This assignment is intended for you to reflect on issues of data quality as it might impact data analytics. We often think in terms of pulling data from databases and being able to answer questions based on simple queries. These examples are meant to highlight how and why that isn’t always the case, making the understanding of our real-world data a critical success factor when obtaining data for analytics. There’s no necessarily correct answer here, so feel free to reflect and experiment with your classmates. There’s no distinction here between initial and response posts the way there is over in our formal discussion assignments. It’s fine here if your first post is already a response to someone else, and there’s no particular number of posts required. At the end of the class, you’ll individually submit a reflective essay that summarizes and aggregates any lessons you learn here, so the more you participate, the easier and better that final essay will be.