Healthcare Production Function
A theoretical relationship describing how medical inputs, such as physician time, tests, and drugs, combine to produce healthcare services or outcomes.
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.
Healthy Year Equivalent
An alternative to the QALY deriving its valuations directly from a sequence of health states over a lifetime, rather than combining separate utility values.
Human Capital Approach
A method for valuing productivity lost to illness, disability, or premature death, based on the market wages the person would otherwise have earned.
Hyperbolic Discounting
A pattern of time preference in which people discount the near future more steeply than the distant future, unlike constant exponential discounting.
Income Elasticity of Demand
A measure of how quantity demanded responds to a change in consumer income, calculated as percentage change in demand over percentage change in income.
Incremental Cost
Incremental cost is the difference in expected total cost between one healthcare option and its stated comparator, calculated using the same population, perspective, time horizon, currency, price year and costing methods.
Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER)
The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio, or ICER, is incremental cost divided by incremental effectiveness, expressing the additional cost per additional unit of outcome when ratio interpretation is meaningful.
Incremental Cost-Utility Ratio
The difference in cost between two interventions divided by the difference in quality-adjusted life years they produce.
Incremental Effectiveness
Incremental effectiveness is the difference in health outcomes between an intervention and its comparator, calculated in a consistent outcome unit and comparison direction.
Incremental Net Benefit
The difference in expected net benefit between two competing interventions, found by converting the incremental health effect into money and subtracting incremental cost.
Incremental Net Monetary Benefit
Incremental net monetary benefit, or INMB, converts the difference in health outcomes between two alternatives into a monetary value at a stated cost-effectiveness threshold and then subtracts their difference in cost.
Indirect Elicitation
A health state valuation approach in which a descriptive questionnaire's responses are converted into a utility value using a pre-existing scoring algorithm.
Indirect Utility Assessment
The process of obtaining a health state utility value by applying a scoring algorithm from a prior valuation study to a respondent's questionnaire answers.
Inelastic Demand
A condition in which quantity demanded changes proportionally less than a given price change, indicating consumers are relatively insensitive to price.
Inflation Rate
The percentage rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services rises over a given period.
Information Asymmetry
Information asymmetry occurs when one party to an economic decision has more or better information than another, affecting choices, bargaining power and the efficiency of resulting outcomes.
Intangible Cost
A cost representing the non-financial burden of illness or treatment, such as pain or reduced quality of life, that is hard to value in money.
Integrated Cost Analysis
A cost analysis that combines data from multiple sources, such as claims, clinical records, and patient surveys, into a single costing exercise.
Internal Rate of Return
The discount rate at which the net present value of a stream of cash flows equals zero, used to summarise an investment's return.
Interval Scaling
A measurement scale property in which numerical differences correspond to equal differences in the underlying quantity, allowing meaningful arithmetic operations.