The healthcare industry is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing industries. Consuming over 10 percent of gross domestic product of most developed nations, health care can form an enormous part of a country's economy. In 2003, health care costs paid to hospitals, doctors, nursing homes, diagnostic laboratories, pharmacies, medical device manufacturers and other components of the health care system, consumed 15.3 percent of the GDP of the United States, the largest of any country in the world. In 2001, for the OECD countries the average was 8.4 percent with the United States (13.9%), Switzerland (10.9%), and Germany (10.7%) being the top three.

The healthcare industry includes the delivery of health services by doctors and other allied health providers. Usually such services receive payment from the patient or from the patient's insurance company; although they may be government-financed (such as the National Health Service in the United Kingdom) or delivered by charities or volunteers, particularly in poorer countries.

Health informatics or medical informatics is the intersection of information science, medicine and health care. It deals with the resources, devices and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems.

Subdomains of (bio) medical or health care informatics include: clinical informatics, nursing informatics, imaging informatics, consumer health informatics, public health informatics, dental informatics, clinical research informatics, and bioinformatics, and pharmacy informatics.
InfoSpan (has served) has the capability to serve the Healthcare in the following areas

• Architectures for electronic medical records and other health information systems used for billing, scheduling or research
• Decision support systems in healthcare
• Standards (e.g. DICOM, HL7) and integration profiles (e.g. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) to facilitate the exchange of information between healthcare information systems - these specifically define the means to exchange data, not the content
• Controlled medical vocabularies such as the Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) or OpenGALEN Common Reference Model - used to allow a standard, accurate exchange of data content between systems and providers
• Use of hand-held or portable devices to assist providers with data entry/retrieval or medical decision-making