Analytics is often divided into three subcomponents–descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. Descriptive analytics encompasses using the analytic techniques previously discussed to better describe or summarize the process under study. Understanding how care is delivered is one process that stands to benefit from descriptive analytics.

How can we use descriptive analytics to better understand healthcare delivery? The following is one example of a visualization of a toddler's emergency department (ED) care record when they presented complaining of an asthma exacerbation (Basole et al., 2015). It uses structured clinical data commonly found in EMR systems to summarize the temporal relationships of the care events they experienced in the ED. The visualization consists of four types of activities–administrative (yellow), diagnostic (green), medications (blue), and lab tests (red). These are encoded by color and by y-position. Along the x-axis is time. The black bar on top is divided by vertical tick marks into hour-long blocks. This patient's visit lasted a little over two hours. Information about the patient is displayed before the black time bar.

While descriptive analytical studies such as these may not directly impact costs or medical care recommendations, they serve as a starting point for exploring and understanding the patient care and often pave the way for more specific and actionable analytical methods to be launched: