Monitoring Hospital Outcomes Using a Scan Statistic

摘要

Researchers in hospital faced a problem in finding a suitable method for analyzing epidemiological data since the number of events occurring is likely to be small. Such events include infections, colonization of bacteria and mortality. The well-known simple methods for calculating the rates of rare events frequently perform poorly and so this paper describes a method that is sensitive and suitable in this situation. This method is based on the scan statistic and the theoretical aspects of the test are investigated using the Markov chain theory.