Question

On rare occasions, a medical procedure is performed on the wrong body part of a patient's body or on the wrong patient. These are called wrong-site and wrong-patient mistakes. Such errors occur hundreds of times each year across the United States. The medical community is trying to eliminate these errors but have had difficulty reducing their frequency. In a small percentage of these cases, the patient files a lawsuit against the hospital. Philip Stahel et al. conducted a study on these mistakes and the lawsuits that follow. (1) The data in the file WrongSiteWrongPatient.xlsx (located in the data page of the online text book.) represent the amount (in US dollars) hospitals have been required to pay in wrong-site and wrong-patient lawsuits. Some of the values equal zero, indicating that the hospital won the legal battle.

(1) Source: JAMA Surgery

Find the mean amount hospitals had to pay in wrong-site lawsuits. Round your answer to the nearest whole dollar.

Answer 1

To find the mean amount hospitals had to pay in wrong-site lawsuits, sum all the lawsuit payments and divide by the total number of lawsuits, rounding to the nearest whole dollar. This highlights the technical process of calculating an average while also acknowledging the broader importance of preventing medical errors.

Step-by-step explanation:

To calculate the mean amount hospitals had to pay in wrong-site lawsuits, one would first need to extract the relevant data from the WrongSiteWrongPatient.xlsx file. This data file consists of the amounts (in US dollars) that hospitals have been required to pay when losing lawsuits related to wrong-site surgeries. The mean, also known as the average, is computed by summing all the amounts paid by hospitals and then dividing by the number of lawsuits listed in the dataset. It is important to note that some of the values might be zero, reflecting cases where the hospital was not found liable or no damages were awarded.

In this hypothetical scenario, let's assume that after summing all the amounts and counting all the lawsuits, the total amount paid by the hospitals is $X and the number of lawsuits is Y (including those where the payment was zero). The mean amount paid would be X divided by Y. If we computed this and obtained a number with decimals, we would round it to the nearest whole dollar as requested.

It is also critical to be aware of the larger ethical and legal contexts of these issues. The examples referenced from the insurance studies and the historical case of Semmelweis highlight the complexity of the medical field and the ever-present need for stringent protocols to prevent such errors and ensure patient safety.