HealthCare Industry

Literary ‘Healthcare’ means the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well-being through the services offered by the medical and allied health professions.

The term "health care system" refers to a country's system of delivering services for the prevention and treatment of disease and for the promotion of physical and mental well-being. Of particular interest to a health care system is how medical care is organized, financed, and delivered. The organization of care refers to such issues as who gives care (for example, primary care physicians, specialist physicians, nurses, and alternative practitioners) and whether they are practicing as individuals, in small groups, in large groups, or in massive corporate organizations. The financing of care involves who pays for medical services (for example, self-pay, private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid) and how much money is spent on medical care. The delivery of care refers to how and where medical services are provided (for example, in hospitals, doctors' offices, or various types of outpatient clinics; and in rural, urban, or suburban locations).

Health care systems, like medical knowledge and medical practice, are not fixed but are continually evolving. In part, health care systems reflect the changing scientific and technologic nature of medical practice.

Over the next few years, the healthcare industry is expected to be one of the top two industries to leverage information technology (IT) and to recognize significant growth. However, firms are often challenged with being able to successfully implement and accurately measure the benefits and profitability of these IT systems.

Below are a few significant statistics that the U.S. Department of Labor released in a January 2006 report.

• The healthcare industry is predicted to add nearly 3.5 million new jobs between 2002 and 2012, an increase of 30 percent.

• From 2002 to 2012, 10 of the 20 fastest growing occupations are predicted to be concentrated in health services. These positions include medical assistants (59 percent growth), physician assistants (49 percent growth), home health aides (48 percent growth), and medical records and health information technicians (47 percent growth).

• Projected rates of employment growth for the various segments of the industry range from 12.8 percent in hospitals, the largest and slowest-growing industry segment, to 55.8 percent in the much smaller home healthcare services.

IT's role in the healthcare industry is concerning. IT is focusing on improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery and it completely depends on the standardization and use of interoperable health IT.

Healthcare providers and payers of healthcare can now tangibly foresee substantial investment in health IT in the coming years. Central to the growth potential in the healthcare industry is the adoption of and reliance on IT. IT plays a multifaceted role in the healthcare industry. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report that forecasts the top 10 issues in the healthcare industry, three of these issues were directly related to the implementation, adoption, and use of IT. Those three issues include: 1) turning to IT to reduce medical errors and to improve tracking and reporting of safety and quality standards; 2) using IT to enable healthcare providers to improve their ability to capture, store, retrieve, and report quality information, and 3) improving the technology infrastructure to assist in claims processing, create electronic medical records, reduce medical errors, and track performance.

From this it can be concluded that the healthcare industry is projected to show significant progress in using IT to improve data management and to streamline processes.