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The health care industry or health profession treats 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]

For purposes of finance and management, the healthcare industry is typically divided into several groups and sectors. The Global Industry Classification Standard and the Industry Classification Benchmark divide the industry into two main groups: (1) health care equipment & services and (2) pharmaceuticals, biotechnology & related life sciences. Health care equipment and services comprise companies that provide medical equipment, medical supplies, and health care, such as hospitals, home health care providers, and nursing homes. The second industry group comprises sectors companies that produce biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and miscellaneous scientific services.^[3]

[edit] Providers and professionals

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.

Today the health care industry is considered as one of the largest industry throughout the world. And this health care industry includes thousands and thousands of hospitals, institutions which will provide primary, secondary & tertiary level of care. To deliver this care, these health care industries require health care workers, and among these health care workers most of them will be nurses busy in providing care to each & every patient in all aspect. And it has been seen that, throughout the decades the health care workers i.e. nurses have manually adjusted hospital equipments and have provided care to the patients. Manually adjusting the hospital equipments and repetitive manual handling human loads is a physically challenging job and it often causes work related musculoskeletal disorders or other injuries.

[edit] Delivery of services

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The health care 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. The structure of health care charges can also vary dramatically among countries. For instance, unlike the United States, Chinese hospital charges tend toward 50% for drugs, another major percentage for equipment, and a small percentage for health care professional fees.^[4]

There are many ways of providing health care 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, health care 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.

[edit] Medical tourism

Medical tourism (also called medical travel, health tourism or global health care) is a term initially coined by travel agencies and the mass media to describe the rapidly-growing practice of traveling across international borders to obtain health care.

Such services typically include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries such as joint replacement (knee/hip), cardiac surgery, dental surgery, and cosmetic surgeries. However, virtually every type of health care, including psychiatry, alternative treatments, convalescent care and even burial services are available. As a practical matter, providers and customers commonly use informal channels of communication-connection-contract, and in such cases this tends to mean less regulatory or legal oversight to assure quality and less formal recourse to reimbursement or redress, if needed.

Over 50 countries have identified medical tourism as a national industry.^[5] However, accreditation and other measures of quality vary widely across the globe, and there are risks and ethical issues that make this method of accessing medical care controversial. Also, some destinations may become hazardous or even dangerous for medical tourists to contemplate.

[edit] History

[edit] Growth

The health care industry is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing industries.^[6] 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^[7] 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. ^[8] In 2001, for the OECD countries the average was 8.4 percent ^[9] with the United States (13.9%), Switzerland (10.9%), and Germany (10.7%) being the top three.

US health care expenditures totaled US$2.2 trillion in 2006.^[10] 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.^[11]

[edit] Transformation

China has implemented a long-term transformation of its health care industry, beginning in the 1980's. Over the first twenty-five years of this transformation, government contributions to health care expenditures have dropped from 36% to 15%, with the burden of managing this decrease falling largely on patients. Also over this period, a small proportion of state-owned hospitals have been privatized. As an incentive to privatization, foreign investment in hospitals ' up to 70% ownership ' has been encouraged.^[4]

[edit] See also

• Health care
• Health sciences
• List of pharmaceutical companies
• Medical tourism
• Health economics
• Medicine
• Philosophy of Healthcare

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• Mahar, Maggie, Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much, Harper/Collins, 2006. ISBN 9780060765330
• Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Basic Books, 1982. ISBN 0465079342