1-2 Worksheet: Types and Sources of Data

ABC Health Organization is a multi-practice health system in rural America. They have successfully attested to all current stages of the meaningful use initiative, and they use an integrated electronic record. ABC’s services include a 25-bed acute care center (hospital), a women’s health acute and ambulatory center, seven family practice clinics, two internal medicine clinics, a pediatric clinic, and complete orthopedic services.

The physicians involved in the women s center have requested reports to help them discover which of the organization s primary care physicians are referring patients to them and which are not. They would also like to discover which physicians are referring their patients elsewhere.

1.      What type of data would be most useful in this scenario: qualitative or quantitative? Explain your answer.

According to the National Institute for Children s Health Quality (2021), qualitative data is the conceptual and descriptive findings that are gathered through interviews, questionnaires, or observation and presented in narrative or non-numerical form. Qualitative data can be represented by number codes, symbols, or names. On the other hand, quantitative data represent measures of counts or values expressed as numbers (Australian Bureau of Statistics, n.d.).