When we talk about healthcare delivery, you have to think about the healthcare delivery services. Healthcare delivery services depend a lot on many factors, some of them as time. How quickly do you need to provide the healthcare delivery service? How severe is the injury, or some type of disease, or some type of outcome that is very impactful? Other things that you have to consider in healthcare services is the logistics associated with it as well as what type of cognition and what type of care is needed. What we have here is a list of healthcare services that depend a lot on those different types of factors as well as the individual and the population that is in need. As we look at different healthcare services under healthcare delivery, primary care and urgent care are very common. For primary care, it is normally the first point of consultation and you'll be visiting a physician or a dentist depending on what your needs are. Normally, the services are very routine immunization, checkups. A primary care physician is a great person to visit to prevent healthcare issues. However, there may be cases when you have urgent care required. In these cases, normally it is very acute chronic, some trauma has occurred, and you will have to have some type of treatment of either broken bones, some type of exhaustion or pain. These two specifically have a different time element associated with them as I mentioned earlier, but each one of these are services that are provided to the individual. Third type of healthcare services under healthcare delivery include ambulatory care and secondary care, these terms can be confusing. First, ambulatory care doesn't mean necessarily you are in an ambulance. Ambulatory care means basically outpatient care, or there may be times when you have an outpatient surgery, an outpatient treatment where you're going in and then you are leaving that very same day, that is ambulatory care. Secondary care can also be confusing. What this means is you may visit a primary physician, but then what you may need is a specialist to help you with your healthcare need. In this case, you may visit that specialist like a cardiologist, somebody like that, that provides that secondary level of care where a specialist is required for your needs. Other healthcare services under healthcare delivery include tertiary care and quaternary care. Now you can think of these as a continuum as part of primary care and secondary care. If you need help beyond primary and secondary, you may do tertiary care where there is a more fine detail in terms of specialization, maybe some type of cancer treatment, a unique type of cancer that you need tertiary care. Beyond that, maybe there's some quaternary care that you need that requires even more especially. Think of it in terms of that continuum in terms of primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary care, where you may need these different levels of care and you may have such a unique condition, a unique need. You may have to end up going through all four of those different areas of care to address your need. The last area of healthcare services that we'll talk about for healthcare delivery is home and community care. There are cases when you can actually have a healthcare professional come into your home and provide care and other services. They can be physicians, they can be nurses, they can be social workers, maybe a dietitian, and you might need a therapist as well. Those are all available for home care. There may be cases when you need disease management, maybe there are some longer term care needs within the home, there may be cases where there's behavioral disorder treatment that's required as well, and there's also times when you might have an end of life care requirement for your home. All these are available for home services under the healthcare services. This next area of healthcare systems, there's different other types and different ways to view healthcare systems. This diagram shows a six layer pyramid of healthcare systems. You could look at healthcare systems in many different ways, but we'll just talk quickly through this particular rubric that is in front of us. First, if you think about healthcare, what type of infrastructure in terms of regulations and insurers, employees are there. What type of enablers are there in the healthcare system thinking through what is required to enable healthcare systems? There's a point as well when we talk about network. How can we communicate information and collaborate healthcare services so that we provide the best care for the individual or the population? Those type of networks are required. Also, what type of organizations are available for healthcare? There is a wide variety of organizations, we've talked about some of them, all the way from clinics to labs, to assisted living, all types of different organizations that provide healthcare. Also, when we think about healthcare, there are teams required. It cannot be done by just one single person, by a doctor or nurse, there's a team required. An important part of the healthcare team is the family of the patient because that can impact the individual as well as the population. Also, when we look at the types of interventions that can occur, we want to make sure that we are providing the best types of interventions from a healthcare perspective because that will eventually reach the patient and the population. What we want to be able to do have is evidence to show the type of systems that we've put in place through this pyramid structure actually provide impact and provide the best healthcare available.
