In most instances the maximum amount of time that can be granted for an assignment extension is three weeks

Assurance of Learning 

This assignment assesses the following Graduate Learning Outcomes and related Unit Learning Outcomes: 

Faculty of Business and Law Assignment Extension Procedures Information for students seeking an extension BEFORE the due date

If you wish to seek an extension for this assignment prior to the due date, you need to apply directly to the Unit Chair by completing the Assignment and Online Test Extension Application Form (available from ) and sending the completed form as well as your supporting documentation and a draft of your assignment, to our generic email address (Note: completing the Extension Application Form is mandatory if you wish to apply for an extension.)

This process needs to occur as soon as you become aware that you will have difficulty in meeting the due date, but no later than 5-00 pm Thursday 17 September 2020. In other words, requests for extensions will not be considered after the normal close of business on Thursday 17 September 2020.

Please note: Unit Chairs can only grant extensions up to two weeks beyond the original due date. If you require more than two weeks, or have already been provided an extension by the Unit Chair and require additional time, you must apply for Special Consideration via StudentConnect within 3 business days of the due date.

Misreading the due date/time, assignment anxiety or returning home will not be accepted as grounds for consideration.

Conditions under which an extension will normally be considered include:

· Medical – to cover medical conditions of a serious nature, e.g. hospitalisation, serious injury or chronic illness.

Note: temporary minor ailments such as headaches, colds and minor gastric upsets are not serious medical conditions and are unlikely to be accepted. However serious cases of these may be considered.

· Compassionate – e.g. death of a close family member, significant family and relationship problems.

· Hardship/Trauma – e.g. sudden loss or gain of employment, severe disruption to domestic arrangements, victim of crime.

Information for students seeking an extension AFTER the due date

If the due date has passed and you require more than two weeks extension, or you have already been provided with an extension and require additional time, you must apply for Special Consideration via StudentConnect. Please be aware that applications are governed by University procedures and must be submitted within three business days of the due date or previously granted extension due date.

In most instances the maximum amount of time that can be granted for an assignment extension is three weeks after the due date, as Unit Chairs are required to have all assignments submitted before results/feedback can be released back to students.

Penalties for late submission

The following marking penalties will apply if you submit an assessment task after the due date without an approved extension:

· 5% will be deducted from the available marks for each day, or part thereof, up to five days.

· Work that is submitted more than five days after the due date will not be marked; you will receive 0% for the task.

Note: 'Day' means calendar day.

The Unit Chair may refuse to accept a late submission where it is unreasonable or impracticable to assess the task after the due date.  

Additional information 

For advice regarding academic misconduct, special consideration, extensions, and assessment feedback, please refer to the document “Rights and responsibilities as a student” in the “Unit Guide and Information” folder under the “Resources” section in the MIS770 CloudDeakin site. 

Overview

 The purpose of this assignment is to investigate a dataset utilising the knowledge learned in Modules One and Two. This will enable conclusions to be drawn that ultimately assist in decision making. 

The assignment requires you to analyse a given dataset, interpret the results, and then draw conclusions such that you are able to reply to specific questions being asked of you in the form of a business report. (These questions are asked in the following memorandum). 

The aims of the assignment are to:

· provide you with some examples of the application of data analysis

· test your understanding of the material presented in the relevant topics

· test your ability to analyse data and interpret your results

· test your ability to effectively communicate your results to others

Before attempting the assignment, make sure you have prepared yourself well. At a minimum, please read the relevant sections of the prescribed textbook and review the materials provided in Modules 1 and 2 (i.e. Topics 1 to 7).

Scenario 

According to a study published in the US News and World Report the cost of medical malpractice in the United States is $55.6 billion a year, which is 2.4 percent of annual health-care spending. Another 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that annually, during the period 1991 to 2005, 7.4% of all physicians licensed in the US had a malpractice claim. These staggering numbers not only contribute to the high cost of health care, but the size of successful malpractice claims also contribute to high premiums for medical malpractice insurance.   

A report from McKinsey (May 2013) Unleashing the Value of Advanced Analytics in Insurance states: “The proliferation of third-party data sources is reducing insurers’ dependence on internal data. Digital “data exhaust” from social media and multimedia, smartphones, computers, and other consumer and industrial devices — used within privacy guidelines and assuring anonymity — has become a rich source for behavioural insights for insurance companies, as it has for virtually all businesses.  

Recently, the release of previously unavailable or inaccessible public sector data has greatly expanded potential sources of third-party data. The US and UK governments and the European Union have recently launched “open data” Web sites to make available massive amounts of government statistics, including health, education, worker safety, and energy data, among others. With much better access to third-party data from a wide variety of sources, insurers can pose new questions and better understand many different types of risks.”   

An insurance company in Australia has collated a range of data and wants to develop a better understanding of its claims paid out for medical malpractice lawsuits. Its records show claim payment amounts, as well as information about the presiding physician and the claimant for a number of adjudicated or settled lawsuits in this year. 

The Data 

The data set contains numerous variables and details about the claims. For the purpose of this assignment the data set has been simplified to nine variables with information about 200 randomly selected claims made this year.

 The questions you need to answer are contained in the following memorandum.

Memorandum 

Dear Ellyse, 

Can you please carry out an analysis of the medical malpractice Claim data (contained in the file (MedMalLawsCliam Data.xlsx) and prepare a report for me containing answers to the following questions. 

My specific questions are:

Q1. An Overall View of both “Amount” and “severity rating of damage” Can you provide me with overall summaries of

a)  the amount of the claim payment in dollars?   

b)  the severity rating of damage to the patient. 

Q2. Relationships 

a)  Is there a difference in ‘MILD’, ‘MEDIUM’ or ‘SEVERE’ claims when comparing males and females?  

b)  Is there a relationship between the age of the claimant and the amount of the claim payment?

c)  The insurance company would like to get an understanding of the relationship between the speciality of the physician involved and claim amount. 

I realise that the survey relates to a random sample of 200 claims paid out for medical malpractice lawsuits, and that this information can be used to draw inferences about all claims paid out for medical malpractice lawsuits by iFastInsurance. With that in mind, I hope you are able to provide me with answers to the following questions: 

Q3. The insurance company would like to get an estimate of the following.   

a)    Average age of the claimant in years  

b)    Proportion of claims made with a severity condition ‘SEVERE’.  

Q4. The insurance company would like to compare this year’s claims with the industry average.   

a)    The industry average of amount of payment per claim is 68,000 dollars. Is this the same or different this year?  

b)    Based on the industry average, less than 51% of the claimants are either divorced or widowed. Is it the same this year?   

Q5. Appropriate Sample Size 

Finally, the General Manager of the insurance company is concerned that a sample of only 200 claimants seems too small to draw reliable inferences from. I am concerned that increasing the sample to 400 Australians would still be too small to provide accurate results. For a survey we intend to undertake next year, we would like your advice on the following: 

a)    Should a large sample be collected? Does the precision of an estimate increase when a large sample is being used? 

b)    What size sample should be taken to accurately estimate the average amount of claims per year to within 4,000 dollars?   

I look forward to your responses. Sincerely,

Daisy

Business Report Requirements 

·  Your report should be no longer than 3 pages and should not include any charts and tables, or appendices in the report. Charts/graphics and tables are only to be placed in the Data Analysis file i.e. the Excel spreadsheet and not reproduced in the report.

· Suggested formatting for the report: single‐line spacing; no smaller that 10‐ point font; page margins approx. 25mm, and good use of white space.

· Your report must have a cover sheet containing your particulars and Unit details.

· The report is to be written as a stand‐alone document (assume Daisy will only read your report). Thus, you should not have any references in the report to your data analysis output. Eg. “According to Table 1 in the analysis…”

· Your report must contain an executive summary that explains in plain language the purpose of the report and summarises the main findings. The executive summary should be no more than 700 words long.

· The body of your report must be set out in the same order as in the originating memorandum from Daisy, with each section (question) clearly marked  

· Use plain language and succinct explanations. Avoid the use of technical or statistical jargon as Daisy cannot be expected to understand statistical terminology. As a guide to the meaning of “Plain Language”, imagine you are explaining your findings to a person without any statistical training (e.g. someone who has not studied this unit). What type of language would you use in this case?  

· Marks will be lost if you use unexplained technical terms, irrelevant material, or have poor presentation/ organization  

· All Microsoft Excel data analysis output associated with each question in the Memorandum are to be placed in the corresponding tab in the T22020MIS770_A2_yourstudentid.xlsx file  

Data Analysis Instructions/Guidelines 

In order to prepare a reply to Daisy’s memorandum, you will need to examine and analyse the dataset

MedMalLawsClaimData.xlsx thoroughly.

Daisy has asked a number of questions and your Data Analysis output (i.e. your charts/tables/graphs) should be structured such that you answer each question on the separate tab/worksheet provided in your Excel document. There are also three extra tabs in MedMalLawsClaimData.xlsx called CI, HT and SampleSize and you may use the various templates contained in these tabs arriving at your “Confidence Interval”, “Hypothesis” and “Sample Size” answers, should you wish to do so.

Q1. An overall summary of Amount (in dollars) and summary of Severity

You are required to comprehensively describe the variable ‘Amount’ by itself and ‘Severity’ by itself using the most appropriate techniques from module 1. 

Your analysis should include numerical summaries, graphs and tables. The importance of other variables is considered in other questions. You should thoroughly investigate relevant summary measures (and their reliability) for these two variables. Also, there may well be suitable tables and charts/graphs that will illustrate more clearly other important features of amount and severity. (See Topics 1-3 learning materials) 

Q2. Descriptive measures and insights

Your course notes (Module One) give methods (numerical summaries/tables/graphs/charts) for summarising a single variable and investigating the relationships (dependencies) between two variables for these situations. For example

· Pie/Bar charts

· Summary/Frequency Distribution tables

· Comparative summary measures including quartiles and percentiles

· Scatter diagrams

· Coefficient of correlation, R2 value

· Contingency tables/Cross tabs

· Stack bar charts, side-by-side bar charts

· Histograms/Frequency polygons/Ogives

· Single/Multiple box and whisker plots etc. (See Module One learning materials)

Use whatever techniques you have studied in Module 1 to investigate this matter. Generate suitable visualisations (Tables/Graphs/Charts) and numerical measure(s) demonstrating the existence or otherwise of a relationship. Remember to provide a brief overall summary when concluding these questions.                                                

Q3-Q4 The analysis required involves inferential statistics, which are covered in Module 2.

Use the relevant Excel templates (CI and HT) provided in the Data file.

These questions will require you to complete either a confidence interval or a hypothesis test. Go through each of the questions asked by Daisy and decide which technique is the most appropriate. Below are some hints regarding the most appropriate technique: 

· Do we have to make an estimate, and therefore need a confidence interval?

· Are we testing a theory/claim/ or comparing values… and therefore need a hypothesis test? 

So decide which you think is the most appropriate technique (tutorials for topics 6 and 7 help here).

· You can assume that a 95% confidence level is appropriate.

· Use 5% significance in any hypothesis tests you perform, and provide a summary of your conclusions. Where appropriate, make comparisons with other levels of significance (e.g. 10%, 1%).

· To answer some questions you may need to make/check certain assumptions about the data set we are using. Mention these in your data analysis, where relevant. There is no need to mention this in the report.

  Q5. Use the relevant Excel templates provided in the Data file. 

· You should include comparisons for 90%, 95% and 99% and a recommendation the appropriate sample size. 

Note: There is an Appendix at the end of each Chapter of the Prescribed Textbook which describes the basic Excel steps associated with that Topic. Chapters 1 to 9 are applicable for this assessment. 

Other Guidelines: 

·To answer some questions, you may need to make certain assumptions about the data set we are using. Mention these in your data analysis, where relevant. There is no need to mention this in the report.

·Please ensure you analyse the data thoroughly but do not go beyond what the question asks – for example, if one question requires comparison for the Gender classification, it does not mean you must do it for any other question, unless specifically asked to do so.

·We assume you will be using Excel to perform you data analysis.

·Detailed algebraic responses are not expected. Thus, avoid including extensive derivations, formulae, etc. You are to use Excel where possible to complete your answers.

·In your data analysis output you may include, as annotations, appropriate comments in either plain or technical language. These will be assumed to be your personal working comments.

·Overall, you will generate a great deal of output for this assignment, but you should trim it down to only show the most relevant results. Superfluous output will be penalised, so ensure you only include relevant materials (graphs, tables, calculations, tests, etc.) that are essential for writing up your report.

·Any of your computer work that is not useful should be discarded – your data analysis should only include computer output that is relevant to your report.

·Save your computer analysis frequently (every 10 to 15 minutes). 

Submission 

Your completed assignment should be submitted in two separate files:

·Business report (Part A): A Word document of no more than 3 pages that is not to contain any charts/tables/graphs. (Note: Do not submit a pdf document in lieu.). Please name your Word document T22020MIS770_A2_yourstudentid.docx

·Data Analysis (Part B): An Excel document containing separate tabs/worksheets with charts/tables/graphs for each question. Please note that all interpretations should be presented in your “Business Report” and the Excel document should only contain your intermediate analysis and final output. Please name your Excel document T22020MIS770_A2_yourstudentid.xlsx

The assignment is to be submitted to the MIS770 assignment box in Deakin’s Cloud Campus before 8 pm, Thursday 17 September 2020. Please ensure that you include your name and student details in your Word document as well following the above file naming convention. Failure to follow this convention may lead to a delay in receiving feedback and marks.