Data Collection...Data Collection

These last few weeks have been all about data collection and redefining my process. I have gotten through the month of June. I have been finding that each month is taking me around 6-8 hours to collect the data, which has been a little disheartening. After some advice from my adviser, I have started to look at my data in a different ways. Although I am collecting a 'months' worth' of data, I am actually collecting data on several hundreds of cases each month. Rather than looking at my data in terms of how many months I have collected, I need to look at it as how many cases I have looked at. After collecting 4 months of data, I have 520 cases to look at. At the suggestion of the statistician that I was working with, I took out all duplicate admissions. (I.e. if a person was admitted multiple times to the hospital during the time frame, I am only considering the first admission in order not to skew the results). After removing the multiple cases, I have 459 eligible cases for the months of March-June 2016.

I have sent my data thus far to the statistician and am hoping he can guide me as to what path to take next. In the future, I would like to collect on all of the months in order to have a more robust study in hopes of future publications.

That is all for now!