Registered Health Information Administrator / Technician (RHIA / RHIT) Healthcare Statistics, Data Analytics, and Research Flashcards

24 sample cards from the Healthcare Statistics, Data Analytics, and Research deck

Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.

1. What are KPIs (key performance indicators)?

   Quantifiable measures selected to evaluate progress toward an organization's critical objectives and overall performance.

2. What is business intelligence (BI)?

   The technologies, applications, and practices for collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting business data to support better organizational decision-making.

3. What is the difference between a retrospective and a prospective research study?

   A retrospective study looks backward at data already collected (past events/records); a prospective study follows subjects forward in time to collect new data on outcomes as they occur.

4. What distinguishes a cohort study from a case-control study?

   A cohort study follows groups defined by exposure status forward to compare outcome incidence; a case-control study starts with people who have an outcome (cases) and those who don't (controls) and looks backward to compare prior exposures.

5. What is the gold standard study design for establishing causation, and what is its defining feature?

   The randomized controlled trial (RCT); its defining feature is random assignment of subjects to intervention or control groups, which minimizes bias and confounding.

6. Differentiate qualitative and quantitative research.

   Qualitative research explores non-numeric data (interviews, observations) to understand experiences and meanings; quantitative research collects numeric data and uses statistical analysis to test hypotheses and measure variables.

7. What is the difference between reliability and validity in research measurement?

   Reliability is the consistency/reproducibility of a measurement; validity is whether the measurement actually measures what it is intended to measure. A measure can be reliable without being valid.

8. What is the role of an Institutional Review Board (IRB)?

   To review and oversee research involving human subjects to ensure ethical conduct, protection of subjects' rights and welfare, and informed consent.

9. What is a confounding variable?

   An extraneous variable associated with both the exposure and the outcome that can distort or falsely suggest a relationship between them.

10. What is the difference between incidence and prevalence?

    Incidence is the number of new cases of a condition occurring in a population over a specified period; prevalence is the total number of existing cases (new and old) in a population at a given point or period.

11. Define a healthcare registry.

    An organized system for the collection, storage, retrieval, analysis, and dissemination of data on individuals with a particular disease, condition, or exposure for a defined purpose.

12. What is the primary purpose of a cancer (tumor) registry?

    To collect, manage, and analyze data on cancer patients (diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes) to support cancer surveillance, research, and quality care, often reporting to state and national programs.

13. In cancer registry operations, what is the difference between case finding and the accession (case) registry?

    Case finding is the process of identifying patients with reportable cancers; the accession registry is the chronological listing of all cancer cases entered into the registry, each assigned a unique accession number.

14. What is the purpose of follow-up in a cancer registry, and what minimum follow-up rate is typically expected for accreditation?

    Follow-up tracks patients' survival and treatment outcomes over time; accredited programs typically must maintain follow-up on at least 90% of all eligible analytic cases (and 80% from the reference date).

15. What is a trauma registry used for?

    To collect data on traumatic injury cases to improve trauma care quality, support injury prevention programs, evaluate outcomes, and supply data for research and trauma system planning.

16. What is the difference between a primary and a secondary data source in healthcare?

    A primary data source is the original record of patient care, such as the health record itself; a secondary data source is derived from primary records, such as a registry, index, or database created for a specific purpose.

17. What are a disease index and an operation index?

    A disease index is a listing of patients arranged by their diagnosis codes; an operation index is a listing of patients arranged by their procedure codes. Both are secondary data sources used to locate cases by condition or procedure.

18. What is the Master Patient Index (MPI) and what is its primary function?

    A permanent database listing every patient ever treated by a facility, linking each patient to their unique medical record number; it ensures accurate patient identification and serves as the key to locating records.

19. What is the difference between a facility-based registry and a population-based registry?

    A facility-based registry collects data only on patients treated within a specific institution; a population-based registry collects data on all cases of a disease within a defined geographic population.

20. Name two large national/federal secondary databases used for healthcare research and analytics.

    Examples include the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) file, and the NCDB (National Cancer Database).

21. What is the difference between an internal and an external data source for benchmarking?

    Internal data come from within the organization (its own records and registries); external data come from outside sources such as state databases, national registries, or peer-organization comparisons.

22. What does a rate express, and how does it differ from a ratio and a proportion?

    A rate measures the frequency of an event relative to a population at risk over time (often per 1,000 or 100,000). A ratio compares two quantities (a:b) that may be unrelated. A proportion is a type of ratio where the numerator is included in the denominator (a part of the whole).

23. What is data integrity, and why is it critical to healthcare analytics?

    Data integrity is the accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability of data throughout its lifecycle; it is critical because analytic outputs and decisions are only as trustworthy as the underlying data quality.

24. What does it mean for data to be 'normalized' or for a process to use data standardization?

    It means transforming data into a consistent format, terminology, or scale so that data from different sources can be accurately compared, aggregated, and analyzed.

What this deck covers

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