SPURIOUS CORRELATION

Spurious Correlations in Health Care Quality Management

[Name of the Institute]Introduction

This paper critically analyzes the effect of spurious correlation on the findings of research health care quality management. Research work in health care quality management serves the humanity and the results of these researches maximize the human welfare. With such importance the methods applied in these researches must be efficient and effective. Among many issues that affect the validity of research work, one is the spurious correlation. Spurious correlations affect the measure of hospital quality of care. It is expected that when two outcomes are used to measure quality of care they will be highly correlated, but this can be mistaken.

Through reviewing three publications in regard of spurious correlation and its remedy, this paper analyzes two methods of avoiding spurious correlation. One is designing a selection model and other is eliminating different kinds of trends in a non-stationary time series. Time series are widely used in studies of hospital care and the results are applicable worldwide. Researchers are now trying to make these studies flawless. As the subject relates to human life and human welfare, this issue is very important and sensitive.

Statement of the Problem

Spurious correlations between variables can affect the way issues in healthcare are resolved. Therefore, spurious correlations must be tested and ruled out in order for hospitals to be able to effectively improve the quality of health care and reduce costs. How researchers are improving the quality of their work and resolving the problem of spurious correlation in research work on health care quality management?

Health Care Quality Management

Health care industry faces a serious issue of declining quality and escalating costs. The forces that derive the health care quality are numerous and are often misunderstood with effects of hospital qualities. Today the need is to provide high quality health care in a cost effective manner. The two terms are tending to have same meanings, 'managed care' and 'managed cost'. The competition today has reached to an extent of managing cost while the historic criterion of competition that is the basis of quality is often neglected. Although every field demands better quality, in health care meeting quality is a sensitive issue. No hospital has ever recognized without delivering quality treatment, no patient compromises quality on cost, no physician ever denied the treatment in order to minimize the cost, hence the field of health care demands hospitals to manage quality as natural habit not as a requirement or duty.

Spurious Correlation

Many research methods use correlation in hope of finding causality between two or many indicators of the discipline. For example, in health care quality management, negative correlation between number of patients admitting daily and the number of deaths in the hospital is taken by the researcher as a sign of better quality of a hospital. The problem in this analysis is that the higher number of patients admitting in the hospital does not cause the reduced death rate at that hospital. Hence, correlation is not ...