Population
Population, in health economic evaluation, is the group of people a decision or analysis concerns, defined by condition, characteristics and care pathway.
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.
Positive Economics
Positive economics is the branch of economics that explains and predicts what is, such as how a sugar tax changes purchases, not what ought to be.
Positive Externality
A positive externality is an uncompensated benefit, such as lower infection risk for others after vaccination, that an activity gives to third parties.
Preference
A preference is a comparative evaluation by which a person ranks one option above, below or equal to another, the basis of health utilities and WTP.
Preference Elicitation
Preference elicitation measures what people value in health care from stated or revealed choices, yielding QALY weights, money values or risk trade-offs.
Present Value
Present value is what a future cost or health gain, or a stream of them, is worth today, found in economic evaluation by discounting each year's amount.
Price Elasticity of Demand
Price elasticity of demand is the percentage change in quantity demanded after a 1% price rise, used to forecast how patient charges change use of care.
Principal Agent Model
A formal framework analysing situations where a principal delegates decisions to an agent whose interests may not fully align with their own.
Principal-Agent Problem
The principal-agent problem arises when patients or payers rely on providers who know more than they do, act unobserved and may pursue other interests.
Principal-Agent Problem in Healthcare
The specific version of the principal-agent problem in the physician-patient relationship, where clinical expertise gaps create both helpful guidance and risk of distorted recommendations.
Probability of Cost-Effectiveness
The probability of cost-effectiveness is the chance, given current evidence, that an intervention has the highest mean net benefit at a stated threshold.
Producer Surplus
Producer surplus is the gain suppliers of health care, such as drug makers, make by selling each unit at a price above the least they would have accepted.
Production Possibility Frontier
The production possibility frontier (PPF) shows the largest combinations of two outputs, such as health in two patient groups, that fixed resources allow.
Productive Efficiency
Productive efficiency is producing a health service or outcome at the lowest feasible cost, wasting no inputs and combining them in the least-cost mix.
Property Rights
Property rights are entitlements to use a resource, exclude others, take its income and transfer it, as with medicine patents or pharmacy contracts.
Proportional Shortfall
Proportional shortfall is the share of remaining expected QALYs that patients lose to a condition versus healthy peers, used to grade severity in HTA.
QALY Calculation Method
The process of computing quality-adjusted life years by multiplying time spent in a health state by its utility value, then summing across states.
QALY Shortfall
QALY shortfall is the expected QALY gap between a matched general population and patients on current care, which NICE reads as absolute or proportional.
Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY)
A quality-adjusted life year (QALY) combines length and quality of life in one measure: a year in full health counts as one QALY and death counts as zero.
Quality-Adjusted Time Without Symptoms
Quality-adjusted time without symptoms (Q-TWiST) sums cancer survival time with toxicity, free of symptoms and after relapse, each weighted for quality.