Maharaja Surajmal Institute

New Delhi
Program: BBA LLB Subject Code: BBA LLB 121
Subjects name: Quantitative Techniques Name of Faculty: Dr Mamta Gupta

Assignment 1
Case: Himgiri Hospital
The hospital recently has installed a new computer- based, interactive, hospital communication
system. The system fully integrates the communication activities of admitting, nursing, physician
services, laboratory, radiology, pharmacy and assorted medication services, business office,
medical records, central supply, dietary services, emergency, and outpatient.
In special training sessions with physicians who were to use the system, the director of the
hospital observed that one of the key variables affecting the physicians was the 'waiting time'
they experienced between inputting data or information requests at a video matrix terminal and
the response by the mainframe computer. One of the doctors who is a cardiologist was
particularly vocal in his complaints about the system: 'Look, I can't wait all day for a machine. I
need information that is accurate and in a form I can use. You can't expect me to also spend time
learning how to use your machine-I have enough to do."
To the physicians, sitting at a terminal and waiting for the computer to respond was simply
intolerable. The director of the hospital was sympathetic to the physicians attitude and had
negotiated a contract with the computer hardware vendor specifying that the average waiting
time not to exceed 10 seconds.
In general all aspects of the system looked either good or excellent with the exception that only
about 60 percent of the physicians were actually using it, and over the past several months there
had been a number of complaints about excessive waiting times.
The director was considering the possibility of holding a new series of training sessions for the
physicians, but he decided to first review the data collected on actual waiting times experienced
by the physicians. These sets of data were available: those collected during the original training
session in January 2019 and those collected by time (in seconds) data are given below: staff
analysts in March 2020 and May, 2020. These waiting- time (in seconds) data are given below:

January 2019
9 8 5 6 6 7 9 9 8 7
March 2020
8 6 14 12 12 8 7 10 12 10
May 2020
7 7 15 16 13 7 17 15 14 7

Questions for discussion

1. Calculate the mean waiting time for each of the three sets of data. Do the mean waiting times
appear to be in conformance with the established standard?
2. Calculate the median waiting times for each of the three sets of data. What general conclusions
can you draw?
3. Determine the range and standard deviation for each of the three sets of data and consider the
implications of the results.