Healthcare is the prevention and treatment of illness as well as the improvement of wellbeing by medical professionals. This term can be used to describe healthcare provided to individuals, but often refers to the healthcare delivery systems responsible for providing health services to communities more broadly, including entire countries. Access to healthcare is thus important for promoting and maintaining the physical and mental wellbeing of the general public.
Healthcare is especially important to learn about because it is becoming more complex as health economics change. In the United States and other countries, the question of how to provide affordable and effective health insurance has been a politically challenging one, as healthcare costs have grown alongside aging populations - and existing government policies to ensure healthcare access have struggled to keep up. The provision of insurance and health services more broadly may be covered by public entities, private companies, or both, and different countries are attempting to meet these needs with different combinations of policy frameworks.
As in other areas of the economy, the growing use of information technology holds promise to transform this sector. Health informatics is helping medical professionals manage patient data far more efficiently, facilitating better treatment and enhanced collaboration between different healthcare providers. The power of this approach will be further enhanced by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), which will allow doctors to harness more information for diagnosis and develop data-driven decision support systems for the evaluation of different treatments for patients.