In a hospital with many providers, reviewing 20 percent of each provider's inpatient admissions every other year reflects which sampling approach?

In a hospital with many providers, reviewing 20 percent of each provider's inpatient admissions every other year reflects which sampling approach?

• A. Audit
• B. Total enumeration
• C. Randomization
• D. Sampling

Answer: (D)

The main idea here is sampling. Instead of checking every inpatient admission, you’re looking at a portion of them—20 percent—from each provider, and you repeat this every other year. This creates a representative snapshot of performance across providers while keeping the workload manageable. If you were auditing every admission, that would be total enumeration. If you were selecting cases purely by a random process from all admissions, you’d be describing randomization. But the description specifically uses a fixed fraction of the population rather than claiming every case or a purely random method, so the approach fits the concept of sampling.

The main idea here is sampling. Instead of checking every inpatient admission, you’re looking at a portion of them—20 percent—from each provider, and you repeat this every other year. This creates a representative snapshot of performance across providers while keeping the workload manageable. If you were auditing every admission, that would be total enumeration. If you were selecting cases purely by a random process from all admissions, you’d be describing randomization. But the description specifically uses a fixed fraction of the population rather than claiming every case or a purely random method, so the approach fits the concept of sampling.