Health care industry

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The health care industry or health profession treats and tends to patients who are injured, sick, disabled, or infirm. The delivery of modern health care depends on an expanding interdisciplinary team of trained professionals.[1][2]

Providers and professionals

Main article: Health care provider

A health care provider or health professional is an organization or person who delivers proper health care in a systematic way professionally to any individual in need of health care services.

Delivery of services

The healthcare industry includes the delivery of health services by health care providers. Usually such services are paid for by the patient or by the patient's insurance company; although they may be government-financed (such as the National Health Service in the United Kingdom) or delivered by charities or volunteers, particularly in poorer countries. There are many ways of providing healthcare in the modern world. The most common way is face-to-face delivery, where care provider and patient see each other 'in the flesh'. This is what occurs in general medicine in most countries. However, healthcare is not always face-to-face; with modern telecommunications technology, in absentia health care is becoming more common. This could be when practitioner and patient communicate over the phone, video conferencing, the internet, email, text messages, or any other form of non-face-to-face communication.

History

Growth

The health care industry is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing industries.[3] Consuming over 10 percent of gross domestic product of most developed nations, health care can form an enormous part of a country's economy. In 2003, health care costs paid to hospitals, physicians, nursing homes, diagnostic laboratories, pharmacies, medical device manufacturers and other components of the health care system, consumed 15.3 percent[4] of the GDP of the United States, the largest of any country in the world. For United States, the health share of gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to hold steady in 2006 before resuming its historical upward trend, reaching 19.6 percent of GDP by 2016. [5] In 2001, for the OECD countries the average was 8.4 percent [6] with the United States (13.9%), Switzerland (10.9%), and Germany (10.7%) being the top three.

US healthcare expenditures totaled US$2.2 trillion in 2006.[7] According to Health Affairs, USD$7,498 will be spent on every woman, man and child in the United States in 2007, 20 percent of all spending. Costs are projected to increase to $12,782 by 2016.[8]

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