The purpose of this data analysis is to gain a hands-on practical experience working with healthcare data. This data is public use files derived from the Vermont Uniform Hospital Discharge Data Set for 2017. Below are the questions I will try to answer using EDA.
- What is the highest and lowest cost DRG (Diagnostic Related Group)?
- What primary procedure is performed the most?
- What is the average hospital stay (in days) for inpatients?
- What is the most common primary diagnosis?
- What is the common principal payment source to pay the medical expenses?
Metadata of the data
The inpatient data set contain 53686 rows and 79 columns. For the simplicity, I choose only 14 columns which are more interesting for the
analysis.
The bar plot shows that age group of 14 (Age of 75 or older) has majority in the inpatient data: there are more older people stay in the hospital while under treatment.
This bar plot illustrates that there is more female patient than male in the inpatient data set.
The above plot shows the Diagnostic Related Group (DRG) Vs charges amount (cost) of the patient in the hospital. In order to get exact maximum and minimum DRG associated with Charges, I have calculated minimum and maximum.
The histogram shows that the principal payment source ‘1’ has a highest frequency: That means (according to data dictionary) Medicare is the most common principal payment source for a patient who stays in a hospital while under treatment.
The decision tree demonstrates the length of stay for patients with probabilities and percentages. For example, if the total cost is less than 227e+3 (22,7000), the patient is more likely to stay for almost five days. Also, the patient stays for fifty-five days if the charge is more than 22,7000 and so on.
- The patients, who stays in a hospital while under treatment, are mostly older (over 75 years old) and are more female in comparison to male.
- The DRG called “extreme immaturity or respiratory distress syndrome” cost more and DRG called “Normal newborn” cost less than other DRG.
- The most common primary diagnosis is ‘Single liveborn infant, delivered vaginally’.
- The highest cost of diagnosis group is pretty high (1,332,080 USD), however most patients are covered under Medicare.
- The average length of stay in the hospital is about 5 days and the patient need to stay longer up to 441 days based on the nature of the diagnosis.
- The patient, belongs to DRG ‘After care with CC/MCC’, discharged after 441 days of admission: which means a patient requires more resources; therefore, hospitals are paid more to care.
The patient belongs to DRG ‘Vaginal delivery w/o complicating diagnosis’ discharged on admission day or the day after admission, which makes perfect sense.