How can measures of variability in statistics be useful in referral management? - Answers

Well, let me start by saying I may be completely off base here but concerning measures of variability in statistics there are four types: a. nominal - which would be something like race, gender, etc b. ordinal - is to place an order to the variable but not to distinguish a specific amount. i.e. upper middle is higher than lower middle (but we don't know how much higher it is..we just know that it is higher) c. interval - allow us to rank the measured items and to assign a quantity and compare the sizes of differences between them. i.e. weight scales..we can say that 10 lbs is more than 5 lbs, and that 20 lbs is more than 10 lbs (with this type of measurement we can even go so far as to say that the difference between 20lbs and 10lbs is twice the difference between 10lbs and 5lbs) d. ratio variables - similar to interval but allows for a point zero and most of the time is not really distinguished apart from interval. With that in mind and readdressing your question, you may wonder how are they not useful? The ability to organize, compare, and determine the correlation of variables to one another in medicine is invaluable and one might wonder what medicine would be without them. If (w) patients exhibit (x) symptom and (y) percent of the time they are diagnosed with (z) disease it would be beneficial to the physician (as far as referral management is concerned) to have that information so that the he/she could more accurately pinpoint what tests and referrals to make for the symptom being displayed. It benefits the patient by helping to promote a timely diagnosis and treatment. This in turn saves time and money for the patient as he/she is not subjected to unnecessary testing, additional costs for testing and return visits to the doctor for follow up results, new test order, and unnecessary prescriptions. However, as much good as this does it is easy to imagine how an insurance company might use the information to limit testing and referrals based upon information provided by measurements of variability when a physician should be allowed to diagnose, test, and refer as he/she deems necessary. Like I said, this may not help but it's here for what it's worth.