HEALTHCHECK

Healthcheck is a term used across fields to denote a routine assessment designed to identify current health status or system viability. In medicine, it refers to an evaluation of an individual's health, often as preventive care or prior to treatment; in information technology, it describes automated checks that verify whether software services, hardware, and networks are operational and performing within expected parameters.

In clinical practice, health checks may include medical history, vital signs, physical examination, risk factor assessment, and screening tests such as cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose, and cancer screenings, depending on age and risk. They aim to detect disease early, assess risk, guide lifestyle advice, and tailor follow-up. Frequency varies by guidelines, patient history, and local practice; many programs target adults at regular intervals, with more frequent checks for high-risk groups.

In information technology, a health check or healthcheck consists of automated probes or checks that verify service availability, response time, error rates, and dependency status. Health checks are used by monitoring systems, orchestration platforms (for example, Kubernetes), and cloud services to trigger alerts or remediation. They may include liveness probes, readiness probes, heartbeat signals, and synthetic transactions. Results inform uptime metrics, capacity planning, and incident response.

Limitations: a healthcheck is not a substitute for comprehensive evaluation or debugging; medical checks may miss asymptomatic disease, and IT checks may produce false positives or negatives or require context. Privacy, consent, and data handling are considerations in medical checks; in IT, securing health data and access control is essential.