A large study conducted at two southeastern US hospitals from October 2007 through October 2008 sought to identify predictive variables for successful intravenous catheter (IV) insertion, a procedure that is potentially difficult and time consuming. The data was collected on a sample of 592 children who received a total of 1195 attempts to start peripheral IV catheters in the inpatient setting. The median age of the children was 2.25 years, with an age range of 2 days to 18 years. Previous published studies did not fully utilize all aspects of the data. In particular it is proposed that the underlying data appears to have a negative binomial structure. While negative binomial regression is a popular technique for overdispersed Poisson data, there are few published studies and available datasets that utilize negative binomial regression on negative binomial data. The goal of this study is to determine the appropriateness of and use negative binomial regression to re-examine this data.
Keywords: Negative binomial regression, intravenous catheter insertion, predictive variables, poisson data
Exploring the use of negative binomial regression modeling for pediatric peripheral intravenous catheterization