Pareto in the Wild: Emergency Room Statistics – Visits by Race

Medical Market Research and what it can tell us, such as emergency room statistics, is a very interesting topic because it is a topic for which we can all relate – most of us have seen a physician, have visited an Emergency Room (ER), and have received some type of medical care.

For this edition of Pareto, I decided to play with some data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and learn about some medical trends and patterns in the United States.

One piece of data which I found interesting and demonstrates the Pareto Principle so well is Emergency Room (ER) Visits by Race:

As you can see, Black and Non-Hispanic Black represent over 57% of the Emergency Room (ER) visits in 2008. With a number that high, I hypothesize that it is not by accident – that is, there is something peculiar in the environment in which African Americans live such that they have a higher likelihood of visiting the Emergency Room than other races.

Again, Pareto shows us some clarity in the data and presents an interesting pattern that deserves further investigation.

We all know the complexity in healthcare from medical billing, medical coding, medical transcription to actual patient care and the emergency room.

Note: For those that are interested, the CDC Website is full of wonderful data sets and statistics that you can personally analyze. Really great stuff.