Comparing Hospital Quality to Mortality Rates

Let's say you're a consultant who is on a team analyzing the performance of hospitals. You are given data on hospitals' mortality rates and their safety performance. Specifically, these data include hospitals around the United States in 2017; mortality corresponds to patients' death rates of heart failure within 30 days after entering the hospital, and the hospital's overall safety performance rating (on a scale from 0 to 100).

1) Get an initial sense of what kind of data is in the dataset.
2) Calculate the correlation coefficient between hospital performance and mortality in the Medicare data.
3) Plot the coefficient with a best-fit line.
4) Decide on the best causal interpretation to explain your findings.

Exercise

Comparing Hospital Quality to Mortality Rates

Instructions