Which of the following tools may be used to summarize charges from a department?

• A. Pivot table
• B. Bar chart
• C. Scatter plot
• D. Histogram

Answer: (A)

To summarize charges by department, you need a tool that groups data by department and computes an overall total or other aggregates. A pivot table does exactly that: you set department as the grouping field and sum the charges as the value, yielding a neat total of charges for each department. It can also be expanded to include averages, counts, or additional filters (like time period or payer), making it easy to explore different angles of the same data in one place.

A bar chart could display the totals once you’ve calculated them, but it doesn’t perform the calculation itself. A scatter plot looks at relationships between two numeric variables, not a category-by-category summary. A histogram shows the distribution of a single numeric variable, not charges broken down by department. So the pivot table is the direct tool for producing the department-level summary.