Descriptive Statistics in Healthcare

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS IN
HEALTHCARE
The basic understanding and importance of statistics in
healthcare.

INTRODUCTION
This is widely used in health care sector as it guides to make decisions as:
1. The health care industry benefits from significant consumer "demographic"
statistics that can expect the sorts of services.
2. Health care companies measures the performance of success or failure.
• Descriptive statistics summarizes variables of sample of population.
• There are several measures in descriptive statistics like frequency, mean,
range, percentile, median, mode and standard deviation and plots like
histogram and box plot.
• Specifically, it can be expressed by measures of central tendency and
measures of variability.
• Measures of central tendency includes mean, median and mode.
• Measures of variability includes standard deviation, variance, skewness and
kurtosis.

FREQUENCY
• Frequency is the number of occurrence of an observation within an interval.
• The width of the interval depends on the size of the data and aim of the
study.
• The intervals are mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
• Frequency is always presented in a tabular or graphical plots (Consoli,
Recupero & Petkovic, 2019).
• For example, height of students can be distributed in different intervals.
• In measuring the height of 50 students (assume), they can be split in three
groups short, medium and tall.
• The interval used to create groups must not overlap each other and should
not contain all the observations.

HISTOGRAM
• Histogram is a graphical representation that arranges the group of data
into ranges.
• It presents the frequency distribution of the data.
• The graph presents the range of column in x-axis and the number of count
or frequency on the y-axis.
• For example, The below graph shows the distribution of 50 students
height
Below 140 140- Less than 160 Above 160
0
10
20
30
20
10
20
Frequency distribution of students
Range of The distribution
Frequency