Introduction (topicality): The reforms, conducted in the system of public health care for the recent decades, resulted in the replacement of the term "medical aid" with the term "medical service", which has its own specific properties and peculiarities, influencing various aspects of the public health services, including organizational, financial and legal ones. Understanding the properties and features of medical services will help provide a theoretical basis for the mechanisms of improving the processes of their provision. Objective: to determine the conceptual approaches to the formation of the properties and specific features of the medical service in the modern health care system. Materials and methods: methods of content analysis were used, publications, information and analytical materials of Russian authors, placed in scientific periodicals, including in the RSCI databases (eLIBRARY.RU) and CyberLeninka were studied. Results and discussion: the literature review showed that most authors do not identify the concepts of "medical care" and "medical service", referring the latter to an economic category, considering the main distinguishing feature to be the presence of use value. A medical service is a set of socially useful actions aimed at improvement of public health and expressed in the consumer value of the product, i.e., it is both a result of professional actions (preservation and improvement of public health), and a social good (a set of socially useful actions), and an economic category (has a consumer value of the product). Conclusions: a medical service has both general characteristic properties of services and specific properties due to its social and vital functions. The highlighted properties turn a medical service into a commodity, endowing it with consumer value.