The financial department at a large hospital would like to estimate the average outstanding balance owed by patients who have not paid their bills in full.
In order for the interval to be useful in making budgeting decisions the department's management staff requires the the interval be no wider than $840 (total) at a confidence level of 95%. Ten files of patients carrying outstanding balances were randomly selected from a list of all of all pediatrics patients and the outstanding balance (rounded to the nearest integer) was recorded.
The data are reported below in Table 1. This can be considered a pilot study. Table 1: Outstanding balances ($) for 10 randomly selected patients:
7076 5344 4976 4747 5167 7429 6601 4316 7167 5148
A) The total number of patient records that must be sampled in order for the finance dept. management to meet their constraints of confidence level and bound is:_________
Note: you should carry at least 5 decimal precision for any intermediate calculations then round your answer as indicated in the problem