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Exercise

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).

Instructions
100 XP
  • 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.