Decision Maker
A decision maker is the person or body, such as NICE, whose choice an economic evaluation informs and whose objectives, budget and values it reflects.
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.
Decision Problem
A decision problem is the choice an economic evaluation or model must inform, stated as population, options compared, outcomes, costs and decision maker.
Decision Rule
A decision rule is an explicit criterion, such as an ICER threshold or net benefit, for choosing between healthcare interventions in economic evaluation.
Default Effect
The default effect is the tendency to stay with a pre-selected option, so opt-out schemes for organ donation or HIV testing raise uptake over opt-in.
Demand for Health
Demand for health is the idea, from the Grossman model, that people value health as a capital stock, so their demand for healthcare is derived from it.
Demand Inducement
Demand inducement is a provider's use of an information advantage to shift a patient's demand for care away from the patient's best interests.
Derived Demand for Healthcare
Derived demand for healthcare is the idea that people want medical care mainly as an input for producing health, the thing they actually value.
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
Differential discounting applies a lower annual discount rate to future health effects, such as QALYs, than to future costs in an economic evaluation.
Diffusion
Diffusion in health economics is the spread of a new technology's use among eligible patients and providers over time, shaping costs and health gains.
Diminishing Marginal Utility
Diminishing marginal utility is the economic principle that each extra unit of a good adds less utility than the last, so the rich will pay more for care.
Diminishing Returns
Diminishing returns is the eventual fall in extra health from each added unit of care, such as another screening round, when other inputs stay fixed.
Direct Cost
Direct cost is a cost traced to a service or patient or, in economic evaluation, resources used for care or due to illness, such as medicines and travel.
Direct Elicitation
Direct elicitation is the valuation of a health state by asking people to trade it against life years or risk of death, rather than through a value set.
Disability Weight
A disability weight is a value from 0 (full health) to 1 (equivalent to death) rating health loss in a non-fatal state, used to calculate YLDs and DALYs.
Disability-Adjusted Life Year
The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) measures health loss by adding years of life lost to premature death and years lived with disability.
Discount Factor
A discount factor is the weight below 1 that multiplies a cost or health effect in a future year to give its present value in economic evaluation.
Discount Rate
The discount rate is the annual rate, such as NICE's 3.5%, used in economic evaluation to convert future costs and health outcomes into present values.
Discounting
Discounting converts future costs and health effects, such as QALYs, into present values so that options with different timings can be compared.
Discrete Choice Experiment
A discrete choice experiment (DCE) is a survey where people choose between hypothetical health care options described by attributes, to measure trade-offs.