Dictionary
The Dictionary provides concise definitions of health economics terms, arranged alphabetically for quick reference. Use it to understand unfamiliar terminology or confirm the meaning of a specific term.
S
- Surgical Infection Economics
- The application of health economic evaluation to infections following surgery, covering prevention strategies such as prophylactic antibiotics and treatment once they occur.
- Surgical Safety
- A patient safety dimension focused on preventing harm during surgery, covering structured checklists, antibiotic timing, and surgical team communication.
- Survival Analysis
- A branch of statistics concerned with the time until an event of interest occurs, appropriately accounting for censored observations.
- Survival Function
- A function giving the probability that a person survives without the event of interest beyond a specified point in time.
- Survival Methods
- Statistical techniques analysing time-to-event data, from non-parametric Kaplan-Meier through semi-parametric Cox models to fully parametric survival distributions.
- Survival Regression
- A modelling approach estimating the relationship between predictor variables and a time-to-event outcome, including the Cox model and parametric survival models.
- Sustainable Development Goals
- A set of seventeen interconnected global objectives adopted by UN member states, addressing social, economic, and environmental priorities including health.
- Symptom-Free SurvivalSFS
- A time-to-event measure defined as the time from treatment start until the onset or return of clinically significant symptoms.
T
- Technology Lifecycle
- The complete sequence of stages a technology passes through, from development and introduction through maturity to eventual decline or obsolescence.
- Terminal Node
- The endpoint of a branch within a decision tree, where no further events are attached and final cost and outcome values are recorded.
- Tetanus Economics
- The application of health economic evaluation to tetanus, a serious soil-borne bacterial infection largely preventable through vaccination.
- Theory Of Constraints
- A management philosophy identifying the single most limiting factor preventing greater throughput toward a goal, and focusing improvement there first.
- Therapeutic Goal
- The specific clinical outcome a treatment strategy is intended to achieve, such as cure, symptom control, stabilisation, or preventing complications.
- Thrombosis Economics
- The application of health economic evaluation to abnormal blood clot formation, spanning both venous and arterial thrombosis prevention and treatment.
- Transition Definition
- The precise specification of the clinical event or criteria triggering a patient's movement from one health state to another in a Markov model.
- Treatment Goal
- The specific clinical outcome a treatment strategy is designed to achieve, ranging from cure to symptom management to preventing complications.
U
- Unmeasured Confounding
- A situation where a true confounder exists but was not recorded, preventing statistical adjustment for its distorting effect on an association.
- Utility Structure
- The way a decision-analytic model assigns health state utility values, including adjustments for factors such as age or treatment-related adverse events.
V
- Vital Statistics
- Official records of key life events within a population, including births, deaths, marriages, and causes of death, kept by government agencies.
W
- Warm-Up Period
- An initial portion of a discrete event simulation run excluded from results, letting the system reach a representative state before data collection begins.
- Wilcoxon Test
- A test comparing survival distributions that gives greater weight to earlier event times than later ones, unlike the standard log-rank test.
- Withdrawal
- The voluntary or involuntary discontinuation of a participant's trial involvement before its planned completion, whether from adverse events or personal choice.
- Wrong Site Surgery
- A serious, generally preventable safety event where a procedure is performed on the wrong body part, patient, or is entirely the wrong procedure.