About

Purpose and scope

Health economics is an analytically rigorous discipline with a specialised vocabulary. Terms such as QALY, ICER, Markov model and probabilistic sensitivity analysis have precise, and sometimes contested, meanings that can vary across institutions, guidelines and historical periods.

Existing online resources often lack sufficient depth, formal structure, transparent provenance or the machine-readable representation required by contemporary computational workflows.

HealthEconomics.wiki was created to address this gap. Concepts are assigned stable canonical URIs, versioned, timestamped, represented through structured data and maintained through a documented editorial workflow.

The aim is not simply to collect definitions, but to construct a navigable map of health economics for human and computational use.

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. 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

Editors decide what the encyclopaedia covers, how each concept is defined, how concepts relate and which sources support them. Every entry is checked against its cited sources before publication, including its title and short definition, and is approved by an editor before it goes live. Entries are revised when sources change or errors are reported.

Definitions are written against primary literature: peer-reviewed papers, HTA body methods and guidance, and authoritative textbooks. Sources are cited with DOI or ISBN where available.