: The healthcare industry is an aggregation and integration of sectors within the economic system that provides goods and services to treat patients with curative, preventive, rehabilitative, and palliative care. It includes the generation and commercialization of goods and services lending themselves to maintaining and re-establishing health. The modern healthcare industry is divided into many sectors and depends on interdisciplinary teams of trained professionals and paraprofessionals to meet health needs of individuals and populations.

The delivery of healthcare services—from primary care to secondary and tertiary levels of care—is the most visible part of any healthcare system, both to users and the general public. There are many ways of providing healthcare in the modern world. The place of delivery may be in the home, the community, the workplace, or in health facilities.

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, with modern telecommunications technology, in absentia health care or Tele-Health 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..