Marginal Cost of Healthcare
The additional cost of providing one more unit of healthcare service, such as treating one further patient.
Encyclopaedia
Explore comprehensive, evidence-informed explanations of key health economics concepts, including their development, application and relationships to other concepts. Published entries are validated through human expert review.
Concepts, entries and ontology terms
A concept page is a published entry on the wiki. Some concepts also have a full encyclopaedia article. The Health Economics Ontology (HEO) holds every concept, including dictionary terms without an article, so it is larger than the list of published pages. The knowledge graph shows how concepts relate to each other.
Marginal Rate of Substitution
The marginal rate of substitution (MRS) is how much money or another good a person would give up for one more unit of health without being worse off.
Market Equilibrium
Market equilibrium is the price and quantity at which demand for a health service, medicine or health worker equals supply, so the market clears.
Market Failure
Market failure occurs when markets do not allocate resources efficiently, as in health care through externalities, unequal information or insurance gaps.
Marshallian Demand Curve
The Marshallian demand curve is a demand curve showing how much of a good, such as health care, a person buys at each price with money income held fixed.
Measurement Scale Type
Measurement scale type is a variable's level, nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio, which sets valid arithmetic, as with EQ-5D level medians or cost ratios.
Mechanism Design
Mechanism design uses game theory to set rules, such as auctions, tenders or matching schemes, under which self-interested choices serve a chosen goal.
Micro-Costing
Micro-costing is a costing method that lists each resource a health service uses, such as staff minutes and consumables, and values each with a unit cost.
Monetary Valuation
Monetary valuation expresses a health outcome or other non-market good in money terms, using stated preference, revealed preference or wellbeing methods.
Moral Hazard
Moral hazard is the change in behaviour, such as greater use of healthcare, that occurs when insurance shields people from the full cost of their choices.
Moral Hazard in Health Insurance
Moral hazard in health insurance is extra healthcare use when cover lowers the price patients pay, and any reduced effort to stay healthy once insured.
Multi-Attribute Utility
Multi-attribute utility is a health state utility built by combining utilities for several health dimensions with an additive or multiplicative function.
Multi-State Life Table
A life-table framework that uses transitions among multiple living states and death to estimate how long a specified population or starting group is expected to spend in each state.
Multinomial Logit Model
Multinomial logit model (MNL) is a random utility choice model used to estimate preference weights from DCE data, assuming IID extreme value errors.
Nash Equilibrium
A Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies, one per player, from which no player, such as a payer, provider or patient, gains by changing strategy alone.
Negative Externality
A negative externality is an uncompensated cost, such as second-hand smoke or antibiotic resistance, that an activity imposes on third parties.
Net Benefit
Net benefit places health gains and costs on one scale by valuing health at a cost-effectiveness threshold, or directly in money, and subtracting costs.
Net Benefit Approach
The net benefit approach is a cost-effectiveness decision framework that ranks options by net benefit at a stated threshold instead of by ratios.
Net Health Benefit
Net health benefit (NHB) is the health an option gains, in QALYs, minus the QALYs its extra cost would buy elsewhere at the cost-effectiveness threshold.
Net Monetary Benefit
Net monetary benefit (NMB) is an option's health outcome valued in money at a cost-effectiveness threshold minus its cost, used to rank healthcare options.