Medicine in the 20th century has experienced a rapid growth in informational and technological resources, accompanied by increasingly complex patterns of health-care delivery. The importance of health care in modern society is reflected in the fact that about 10 percent of the gross national product of technologically advanced nations is devoted to serving health needs. Society, in turn, has made increasing demands for greater access to health care and for greater accountability from the healing professions. Scarcely a century ago, health care was primarily the task of the family or neighborhood physician, who diagnosed and treated patients with only unskilled help. The modern physician has become only one although an essential component in an enterprise that numbers among the largest in developed countries, both in terms of money and in terms of the number of persons employed.
Hospitals form the largest single component of health-care costs.