A family member can go to one of two local hospitals for heart surgery. Checking
ID: 3238407 • Letter: A
Question
A family member can go to one of two local hospitals for heart surgery.
Checking the history for the past year, you find that each of the two hospitals has performed cardiac surgery on 1000 patients. In hospital A 710 patients survived (71%). In hospital B 540 (54%) survived.
Based on the numbers presented, which hospital do you think is superior in cardiac surgery?
Surely hospital A is better, right?
Now, let’s look at more data. The below chart summarizes three categories of patients (those entering in fair, serious and critical condition) and the survival rate from surgery (in percent) for the two local hospitals.
Patient Entering Condition
Hospital A
Hospital B
Survivors from A (# and percent)
Survivors from B (# and percent)
Fair
700
100
600 or 86%
90 or 90%
Serious
200
200
100 or 50%
150 or 75%
Critical
100
700
10 or 10%
300 or 43%
Total
1000
1000
710 or 71%
540 or 54%
Looking at the data broken down in this way, we see that Hospital B has a higher success rate in all three categories of patients but when averaged all together, Hospital A has the higher overall survival rate. Based on the numbers presented, which hospital do you think is superior in cardiac surgery?
Patient Entering Condition
Hospital A
Hospital B
Survivors from A (# and percent)
Survivors from B (# and percent)
Fair
700
100
600 or 86%
90 or 90%
Serious
200
200
100 or 50%
150 or 75%
Critical
100
700
10 or 10%
300 or 43%
Total
1000
1000
710 or 71%
540 or 54%
Explanation / Answer
B is definitely a superior hospital in Cardiac Surgery.
Reason we can see from the data given that overall (i.e total) the probability of survival in hospital A (71% i.e 0.71) is greater than the probability of survival in hospital B (0.54). But when we see the cases individually, we see that the probability of survival in Hospital B for patients of fair condition (0.90) is greater than the survival rate in hospital A (0.86). Similarly, for patients of serious and critical condition also, probability of survival in Hospital B is greater than that in Hospital A. So Hospital B is a superior hospital.
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