About this encyclopedia

Purpose and scope

Health economics is an analytically rigorous discipline with a specialised vocabulary. Terms like QALY, ICER, Markov model, and probabilistic sensitivity analysis carry precise, contested meanings that vary across guidelines, institutions, and historical periods. Existing online resources either lack depth, lack structure, or lack the machine-readable provenance that computational workflows require.

This encyclopedia was built to fill that gap. Each concept is assigned a stable canonical URI, versioned, timestamped, encoded as Schema.org JSON-LD, and maintained through a documented editorial workflow.

Knowledge graph

Concepts are organised into six semantic categories — Core Concept, Method, Outcome, Policy, Evidence, and Measure — reflecting the functional role each term plays within health-economic reasoning. These categories determine how entries are connected in the knowledge graph and how relationships are typed.

Relationships between concepts are explicitly modelled to create a semantic layer for health economics. Entries are directed and labelled: an entry does not simply link to another; it specifies the epistemic predicate — for example, that a method requires a particular input, that a model extends a prior framework, or that two terms are related to each other in a looser sense. This structure supports graph traversal that reflects how practitioners actually reason across the field.

Editorial policy

HealthEconomics.wiki is a human-led knowledge-management project drawing on more than three decades of professional experience and over a decade of research and reflection on the organisation of health-economics knowledge. Development of the wiki and its concept architecture began in 2018, partly in response to the recognised limitations of Wikipedia as a source of professional health-economics knowledge.¹

The encyclopedia draws on peer-reviewed research, authoritative health-economics texts, methodological guidance, professional expertise and editorial review. Human contributors determine its topics, definitions, conceptual relationships, sources and editorial direction. Artificial intelligence has assisted with some drafting and editing, but it does not determine what is published. All published content is reviewed, revised and approved by human editors.

Every entry passes through a four-stage workflow: Draft, Review, Published, and Deprecated. Only entries with Published status are exposed on the public site. Draft and Review records exist in the system but are withheld until the editorial threshold is met. Deprecated entries remain accessible by URI but are clearly marked.

Definitions are written against primary literature — peer-reviewed papers, HTA body policies and guidelines, and authoritative textbooks. Sources are cited with DOI or ISBN where available. The canonical URI for each concept is minted as a wiki page URL, for example healtheconomics.wiki/concept/training-policy, and is intended to remain stable across revisions.