Medical records department in a large urban hospital.

You direct a medical records department in a large urban hospital. You are concerned that physicians seem to be taking a long time to complete their discharge summaries, thus delaying the billing process. You want to estimate how long the delay actually is. Also, many of the physicians use medical students to write their discharge summaries. You are considering offering this service for all physicians if it seems to substantially reduce delay. You randomly select 5 physicians who use medical students and 5 who do not from the staff of 96 physicians and identify the delay'(in days) in completing discharge summaries for patients in the last 3 months. Your results are in Table 1, below. TABLE 1: TIME TO COMPLETE DISCHARGE SUMMARIES BY PHYSICIAN USE OF MEDICAL STUDENTS FOR ABSTRACTING. Mean Time to Difference N Complete (days) of Means Medical Student Abstracting " Yes 5 23.4 -10 ‘ No S 33.4 ref a) What is the Difference in Means (DM)? The BM in this scenario is 10 b) What does the DM mean in this setting? The Dm means that c) What is the Ratio of Means (RM) (You will need to calculate RM)? The RM is 1.424 d) What does the RM mean in this setting? e) Does the data support the idea that using medical students to write discharge summaries will reduce delays?