Glossary

Publication Details

Charlson index diagnosis

Diagnosis included in the Charlson comorbidity index.

Cornish–Fisher expansion

A mathematical expression used to approximate the quantiles of a random variable based only on its first few cumulants.

Cronbach’s alpha

A measure of internal consistency of scale items.

HanDBase software

Relational database manager for iPhone and iPod touch and other handheld computing devices, personal digital assistants, smartphones and desktops.

Healthcare Resource Group

Grouping of diagnoses and procedures used for costing purposes by the NHS.

Healthcare Resource Group subgroup

Also known as chapter: one of the 22 major categories used to classify HRG codes.

Length of stay trim-point

Number of days after which the tariff no longer covers the inpatient stay and an additional daily cost is required for each day.

Listwise

A method for handling missing data. In this method, an entire record is excluded from analysis if any single value is missing.

LOESS

A form of locally weighted polynomial regression.

Pearson chi-squared test

A test of the independence of two categorical variables.

Poisson distribution

A discrete probability distribution used for count data such as falls.

Rounding

A method of approximating a number to its nearest place value.

Specials

One-to-one nursing which closely supervises a patient at risk of falls, wandering, etc.

U-chart

An attribute control chart that monitors count data over time for varying sample sizes.

Vismatic

Door vision panel.