Debt Ratio
A financial ratio calculated as total liabilities divided by total assets, showing the proportion of assets financed through debt rather than equity.
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.
Decision Making
The cognitive process of selecting a course of action from alternatives using preferences, evidence, constraints and anticipated consequences.
Decision Rule
A decision rule is an explicit criterion for choosing between healthcare interventions by comparing their incremental costs and health effects with the relevant cost-effectiveness threshold.
Demand
The quantity of a good or service consumers are willing and able to purchase at a given price over a specified period.
Demand Curve
A graph showing the relationship between price and quantity demanded, typically sloping downward as consumers buy less when price rises.
Demand for Health
An economic framework in which individuals demand health as a valued and productive stock, while healthcare, personal time and other inputs are demanded partly because they can maintain or improve that stock.
Derived Demand for Healthcare
The concept that demand for healthcare is not valued for its own sake but derives from an underlying demand for health itself.
Dfle Calculation
The process of computing disability-free life expectancy using a life table combining age-specific mortality rates with age-specific disability prevalence.
Differential Discounting
The practice of applying different discount rates to costs and health outcomes within an economic evaluation, rather than discounting both at the same rate.
Direct Elicitation
A health state valuation approach in which respondents value a state directly, using techniques such as the standard gamble or time trade-off.
Direct Utility Assessment
The process of obtaining a health state utility value by asking a respondent to compare a described state against full health and death.
Disability Weight
A value between zero and one representing the severity of health loss from a specific non-fatal condition, used to calculate years lived with disability.
Disability-Adjusted Life Year
A measure of disease burden combining years of life lost to premature death and years lived with disability, expressed as healthy years lost.
Discount Rate
The annual percentage applied to future costs or health outcomes to express them in present-value terms and permit consistent comparison across time.
Discounting Costs
The application of a discount rate to future costs within an economic evaluation, converting them into a common present-day value.
Discounting Health
The application of a discount rate to future health outcomes within an economic evaluation, converting them into a common present-day value.
Discrete Choice Experiment
A quantitative technique for eliciting preferences in which respondents choose among hypothetical alternatives defined by varying attributes and levels.
Distribution-Based MID
An approach to estimating the minimal important difference from the statistical distribution of scores in a sample, such as a fraction of the standard deviation.
Distributional Cost-Effectiveness
An extension of cost-effectiveness analysis examining how an intervention's costs and health effects are distributed across population subgroups, such as by income.
Disutility
The reduction in utility from experiencing a health state worse than full health, expressed as a value below one on the utility scale.