Health care, health-care, or healthcare is the maintenance or improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals in allied health fields. Physicians and physician associates are a part of these health professionals. Dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, medicine, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy and other health professions are all part of health care. It includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, and tertiary care, as well as in public health.
Primary care is the day-to-day healthcare given by a health care provider. Typically this provider acts as the first contact and principal point of continuing care for patients within a healthcare system, and coordinates other specialist care that the patient may need. Patients commonly receive primary care from professionals such as a primary care physician, a nurse practitioner, or a physician assistant. In some localities, such a professional may be a registered nurse, a pharmacist, a clinical officer, or a Ayurvedic or other traditional medicine professional. Depending on the nature of the health condition, patients may then be referred for secondary or tertiary care.
Community health is a branch of public health which focuses on people and their role as determinants of their own and other peoples's health in contrast to environmental health which focuses on the physical environment and its impact on peoples health.
Disease management is defined as "a system of coordinated healthcare interventions and communications for populations with conditions in which patient self-care efforts are significant."
A Chronic condition is a human health condition or disease that is persistent or otherwise long-lasting in its effects or a disease that comes with time. The term chronic is often applied when the course of the disease lasts for more than three months. Common chronic diseases include arthritis, asthma, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and some viral diseases such as hepatitis C and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. An illness which is lifelong because it ends in death is a terminal illness. It is possible and not unexpected for an illness to change in definition from terminal to chronic. Diabetes and HIV for example were once terminal yet are now considered chronic due to the availability of insulin and daily drug treatment for individuals with HIV which allow these individuals to live while managing symptoms.
In health care, self-care is any necessary human regulatory function which is under individual control, deliberate and self-initiated.
Unwarranted variation in health care service delivery refers to medical practice pattern variation that cannot be explained by illness, medical need, or the dictates of evidence-based medicine. It is one of the causes of low value care often ignored by health systems.
Dana Paul Goldman is the Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair and director of the University of Southern California Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and Professor of Public Policy, Pharmacy, and Economics at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and USC School of Pharmacy. He is also an adjunct professor of health services and radiology at UCLA, and a managing director and founding partner, along with Darius Lakdawalla and Tomas J. Philipson, at Precision Heath Economics, a health care consulting firm. Previously held positions include the director of the Bing Center for Health Economics, RAND Royal Center for Health Policy Simulation, and UCLA/RAND Health Services Research Postdoctoral Training Program.
Connected health is a socio-technical model for healthcare management and delivery by using technology to provide healthcare services remotely. Connected health, also known as technology enabled care (TEC) aims to maximize healthcare resources and provide increased, flexible opportunities for consumers to engage with clinicians and better self-manage their care. It uses readily available consumer technologies to deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor's office. Connected health encompasses programs in telehealth, remote care and disease and lifestyle management, often leverages existing technologies such as connected devices using cellular networks and is associated with efforts to improve chronic care. However, there is an increasing blur between software capabilities and healthcare needs whereby technologists are now providing the solutions to support consumer wellness and provide the connectivity between patient data, information and decisions. This calls for new techniques to guide Connected Health solutions such as "design thinking" to support software developers in clearly identifying healthcare requirements, and extend and enrich traditional software requirements gathering techniques.
CareMore, a subsidiary of Anthem Inc., is an integrated health plan and care delivery system for Medicare and Medicaid patients. The company was founded in 1993 by Sheldon Zinberg as a small Southern California regional medical group. Today, CareMore serves 100,000 patients across 8 states with annual revenues of $1.2B. CareMore's President and CEO is Sachin H. Jain.
Guided Care is a model of proactive, comprehensive health care for people with several chronic conditions. A form of medical home, the model has been developed and tested by a multidisciplinary team of experts at the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Guided Care is provided by physician-nurse teams in primary care practices to the physicians' most complex patients, mainly older adults with chronic conditions and complicated health needs. It is designed to increase patients' quality of care and quality of life, while improving the efficiency of their use of health care resources, thus reducing their overall health care costs.
An ambulatist is a licensed health care provider who specializes in the prevention, management, and care coordination of ambulatory patients with chronic diseases by using lifestyle medicine and drug therapy.
The Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement (CFHI) is a non-profit and non-partisan organization based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada that collaborates with governments, policy makers, researchers, front-line clinicians, patients and practice leaders, as well as non-profit and professional organizations to accelerate healthcare improvements and transform Canada's healthcare systems.
Oscar Health Insurance is a technology-focused health insurance company founded in 2012, and is headquartered in New York City. The company focuses on the health insurance industry through telemedicine, healthcare focused technological interfaces, and transparent claims pricing systems.
MDsave is a healthcare ecommerce company co-located in Brentwood, Tennessee, and San Francisco, California.
Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is the use of complex algorithms and software to emulate human cognition in the analysis of complicated medical data. Specifically, AI is the ability for computer algorithms to approximate conclusions without direct human input.
Heal was founded by Nick Desai and Dr. Renee Dua in October 2014. Heal enables doctors to perform house calls.
Luma Health is a San Francisco-based software company providing Healthcare IT solutions for the health care industry. The company’s focus is developing a web-based patient engagement platform which enables a text-first communication between health care providers and patients, referral management, and web scheduling.
