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| Warning: You are viewing this page with an unsupported Web browser. This Web site works best with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, Firefox 1.5, or Netscape Navigator 8.0 or later. Learn more about supported browsers. Analyze nursing data by using PivotTable reports
Applies to: Microsoft Office Excel 2003
By Will RastAre your unit staff members nodding off as you show them the results of this month's chart audits? Are anesthetized patients showing more interest in your data than your staff members are showing? Stop using the same old tables and corporate reports, and start using Microsoft Office Excel 2003 to liven up your data analysis. More-useful data analysis by using Excel 2003You can use Excel 2003 to track any kind of nursing data that needs to be trended over time. This can be as simple as tracking the percentage of patients who receive a particular nursing intervention, such as a pneumonia screen. Or it can be more complex, such as comparing doctors' lengths of stay versus the complexity of their patient population. Hospital electronic medial record (EMR) systems are often antiquated. Many facilities still audit nursing and physician documentation by using paper forms. A typical EMR system can supply you with the raw materials you need in the form of text files. However, to analyze the information most effectively, you need another program, such as Excel 2003. You can use Excel 2003 to provide powerful capabilities that are lacking in most EMR software:
What's a PivotTable report? you might ask. A PivotTable report is a standard Excel 2003 report that you can use to look at your data in multiple ways without laborious data-column manipulation. Think of an Excel worksheet as an x-ray. Although an x-ray is useful, it is still a static, unchanging image. A PivotTable report, on the other hand, is more like an ultrasound image or Doppler image. You can use a PivotTable report to change your view instantly, getting a fuller picture of how your information interrelates. Before trying to build a table or chart, think about what you want to analyze. What kinds of questions are you trying to answer based on the information that you have gathered? How much detail will you need? Are you looking at how a nursing unit is performing? Do you want to see which nurses did the best job documenting a particular intervention? Are you looking at patient outcomes related to staffing levels? Do you want to see how nursing units with a higher percentage of agency nurses are performing versus units with full-time staff? This may sound elementary, but having a clear idea of what questions you want answered will help you build a worksheet that contains relevant information.
The key to getting PivotTable reports to work well is by accurately building your data worksheet. Follow these recommendations when you enter data in Excel worksheets:
Your worksheet might look like the following. In the healthcare field, and nursing in particular, healthcare professionals are accustomed to monitoring events during a specific time period. Did they screen pneumonia patients better this quarter than last? Did nurses remember more often this month to verbally repeat physicians' orders for confirmation? To adequately track this type of data, the date of discharge or admission, for example, must be broken down into month, year, and week or quarter. The good news is that you don't need to do this manually. By adding a few date-handling columns that contain the necessary formulas down to the end of your worksheet, you can enter just one date and let the formulas do all the work for you automatically. Add date-handling cells At the end of each worksheet, you can add a Count, Month, Year, and Quarter column. For example, if the date on which you want to base your table's time frames in column B, and the date in cell B2 is "5/19/2005," the date-handling formulas you would enter in the date-handling cells, as well as the results, are shown in the following table.
Here's the step-by-step process for creating date-handling cells:
 Continuously update your report Say that you want to add data to your worksheet on an ongoing basis. This would mean having to copy and paste formulas into the date-handling cells every time you added information. Wouldn't it be nice if the formula could "hide out" and do its job only when you needed it? It can. You can place the date-handling formulas into the following expression and the results will be displayed only if there is a date in cell B2, or in whichever cell that contains the date on which you want to base your time frames: =IF(ISBLANK(B2),"",(insert date formula here)))
If the cell that contains the date (in this case, B2) is empty, then the formula keeps the cell blank. If you have a date in cell B2, then the formula shows you the result. Here's the step-by-step procedure:
Build a PivotTable reportAfter building a worksheet that contains the data elements you need to answer your questions, you are ready to create a PivotTable report that will help you find your answers. Follow these steps:
The PivotTable report is displayed. Clean up the blank entriesNow you just need to clean up your PivotTable report. If you used date-handling formulas that continuously update your worksheet, your report contains a column named Blank. To remove these entries from your report, follow these steps:
Use your PivotTable report to analyze dataNow comes the fun part — analyzing your data. View data for a particular time period
Analyze each unit trended by month
Compare registered nurses to licensed practical nurses in completing a task
Audit charts for a particular month and unit
Put PivotTable reports to work for youThe key to using PivotTable reports to their full advantage is to examine your data in multiple ways. By dragging various fields between the table and the PivotTable Field List window, you can discover new relationships between various pieces of data. Changing dates and layouts in your PivotTable reports makes the data interactive. You and your staff members can use PivotTable reports to ask questions and have them answered — immediately. About the author Will Rast, formerly a field artillery officer in the U.S. Army, has worked in a variety of positions in the medical field, ranging from a nursing assistant to an open-heart operating room nurse. He has managed the installations of charting software and has trained medical personnel in using the software. Will works as a nursing data analyst and resides in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
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