Acute Otitis Medi A Case Study

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Boatright, Holcomb, and Replogle (2015) sought to investigate whether providers were following the 2004 American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) treatment guidelines when treating children with acute otitis media in an article, Treatment Patterns for Pediatric Acute Otitis Media: A Gap in Evidence- Based Theory and Clinical Practice. Their study concluded that providers were overprescribing antibiotics for mild to moderate acute otitis media in children between the ages of six months and twelve years of age (Boatright et al., 2015). The authors believed that following the 2004 AAP guidelines were the best research practices. The guidelines recommend watchful waiting for patients between the ages of six months to two years with mild to moderate …show more content…

If the child is greater than two years of age, then the guidelines recommend watchful waiting with mild to moderate acute otitis media (Boatright et al., 2015). Antibiotic treatment is only recommended with severe acute otitis media or if the child is under the age of six months with a certain or uncertain diagnosis of acute otitis media (Boatright et al., 2015). The researchers preformed the data analysis rather well. They noted descriptive statistics such as the type of health care provider, the gender of the patients, the ethnicity of the patients, the insurance carrier of the patients, the patients’ daycare attendance status, and the patients’ presence of specific symptoms (Boatright et al., 2015). Descriptive statistics remain useful because they display characteristics of the sample and may describe the study’s variables (Cipher, 2017a). These statistics were displayed in a frequency table, which allowed for easy interpretation of data. The researchers also reported the statistics related to different variables in their study and whether the finding was statistically significant. They noted that statistical significance was found by utilizing a t-test. A t-test utilizes two group or sample means to determine if a statistical

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