What is preventive care?
Defining preventive care
Preventive care, sometimes called preventative care, includes health care services, screenings, and early interventions designed to detect or prevent diseases and health conditions even before you experience signs or symptoms.
Services can include routine physicals, blood work, the flu shot and other vaccines, blood pressure checks, or screenings for chronic diseases.
The good news? These important preventive care services are typically covered by your insurance at no extra cost to you.
Preventive care for better outcomes
What preventive care looks like
Beyond the scope of preventive care
The importance of preventive care is in its ability to catch problems before they're apparent. Once you have signs, symptoms, or specific concerns, care shifts from preventive to diagnostic.
In other words, your doctor goes from general monitoring to trying to figure out what's causing your symptoms.
Some services can be either preventive or diagnostic, depending on why they’re ordered. For example, a mammogram done as a routine screening for someone without symptoms is considered preventive and may be covered at no cost under many health plans. If that same test is ordered to evaluate an existing concern, it’s considered diagnostic and may involve cost‑sharing.
If you’re unsure, your doctor can help explain whether a service is preventive or diagnostic and what that means for you.
