Canadian Health Information Management Association Exam 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

In the context of an acute care facility, a long length of stay (LOS) primarily impacts the mean, which is the average length of stay. The mean is sensitive to extreme values, or outliers, in the data set. When there are instances of significantly long stays, these outliers can raise the average LOS considerably, reflecting the impact of those longer stays on the overall calculation.

In contrast, the median, which represents the middle value when the data is ordered, is less affected by extreme values. Therefore, while the median may provide a more stable measure of central tendency in cases of skewed data distributions, the mean will be more influenced by the long stays, making it a more accurate representation of the total LOS in an acute care setting.

The mode, which refers to the most frequently occurring value in the data set, is not particularly sensitive to the length of stay distribution related to outliers. Likewise, variance, which measures the spread or dispersion of the data, focuses on how much the data points differ from the mean but does not represent a measure of central tendency itself. Thus, the mean is the most affected measure of central tendency regarding long lengths of stay in an acute care facility.