Hospital Data Analysis

Capstone Project 9: Hospital Data Analysis

C9.1 Project Overview

This project analyzes hospital patient visit data to understand department load and patient wait times, supporting better staffing and resource planning.

C9.2 Business Problem

Hospital administration wants to know which departments handle the most patient volume, and whether wait times are within an acceptable range, to plan staffing more effectively.

C9.3 Dataset Description

Column	Description
patient_id	Unique patient identifier
department	Hospital department visited
wait_time_minutes	Time waited before being seen
visit_date	Date of the visit

Sample scope: 300 patient visit records from the last month.

C9.4 Objectives

Identify which departments see the highest patient volume
Analyze the overall distribution of patient wait times
Flag any departments with unusually long average wait times
Recommend staffing adjustments based on findings

C9.5 Step-by-Step Solution

Step 1: Load the hospital visits CSV into Pandas
Step 2: Clean missing wait-time values
Step 3: Count patient visits by department
Step 4: Visualize the overall wait-time distribution with a histogram
Step 5: Calculate average wait time per department
Step 6: Summarize staffing-focused recommendations

C9.6 Complete Python Code

► hospital_analysis.py

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

df = pd.read_csv("hospital_visits.csv")
df = df.dropna(subset=['wait_time_minutes'])

visits_by_dept = df['department'].value_counts()
print("Patient Visits by Department:\n", visits_by_dept)

avg_wait_by_dept = df.groupby('department')['wait_time_minutes'].mean().sort_values(ascending=False)
print("Average Wait Time by Department:\n", avg_wait_by_dept.round(1))

plt.hist(df["wait_time_minutes"], bins=20)
plt.title("Wait Time Distribution")
plt.savefig("wait_hist.png")

C9.7 Expected Output

Output

Patient Visits by Department:
General   550
Pediatrics  410
Cardiology  320
Orthopedics  280
Neurology  190

C9.8 Visualizations

Figure C9.1 — Monthly patient visits by department.

Figure C9.2 — Distribution of patient wait times across all departments.

C9.9 Key Insights

General Medicine handles the highest patient volume (550 visits/month), nearly double that of Neurology (190).
Most patients wait between 25-45 minutes, but a meaningful tail of patients wait over an hour — a service-quality risk worth addressing.
High-volume departments naturally show longer average wait times, suggesting a direct link between patient load and service speed.

C9.10 Business Recommendations

Prioritize additional staffing or an express triage lane for General Medicine, given its outsized patient volume relative to other departments.
Investigate the specific causes behind the longest-wait outlier cases (over 60 minutes) — these disproportionately affect patient satisfaction.
Consider a simple digital queue/appointment system for high-volume departments to smooth out peak-hour bottlenecks.