Decision Uncertainty
Decision uncertainty is the probability that the option preferred on current evidence is not the best, given uncertainty in costs and health effects.
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.
Delphi Method
The Delphi method is an expert survey run in anonymous rounds with group feedback, used in health economics to agree judgements or estimate model inputs.
Departure Process
Departure process is the pattern of times at which patients leave a clinic, ward or other stage of care in a queueing model or discrete event simulation.
Dependent Censoring
Dependent censoring occurs when the chance of being censored is linked to a patient's risk of the event, so standard survival estimates can be biased.
Deterministic Model
A deterministic model is a health economic model with no random elements, so the same inputs always give the same costs, QALYs and ICER.
Deterministic Sensitivity Analysis
Deterministic sensitivity analysis (DSA) reruns a health economic model with chosen inputs set to fixed values to see how results and decisions change.
Deviance Residual
A deviance residual is a signed measure of how poorly a generalised linear or survival model fits each patient; in a GLM its squares sum to the deviance.
Dirichlet Distribution
The Dirichlet distribution is a multivariate distribution for proportions that sum to one, used for uncertain transition probabilities from a model state.
Discrete Event Simulation
Discrete event simulation (DES) is a modelling method that follows each patient from event to event over time, tracking their history and use of resources.
Discrete Model
A discrete model represents at least one aspect of a system through distinct states, events, or time steps, allowing changes to be analysed as transitions among those elements rather than solely as continuously varying quantities.
Distribution Fitting
Distribution fitting is choosing a probability distribution for a health economic model input, such as a cost or event time, and estimating its parameters.
Dynamic Model
A dynamic model is a health economic model whose predictions feed back into its later rates, as when vaccinating some people lowers the risk for others.
Dynamic Programming Health
An optimisation technique solving complex sequential decision problems by breaking them into smaller, nested subproblems solved in relation to one another.
Dynamic Transmission Model
A dynamic transmission model (DTM) lets infection risk rise and fall with the number of infectious people, so vaccine evaluations count herd protection.
ENBS Calculation
ENBS calculation scales a study's per-person EVSI to the population who could benefit, then subtracts its fixed, per-participant and opportunity costs.
Equilibrium
Equilibrium is a state in which economic forces balance, as when demand for health care equals supply, so no one has reason to change prices or plans.
Event Probability
An event probability is the chance that a specified event occurs in a defined population or risk set over a stated time interval.
Event Queue
An event queue is the time-ordered list of future events that a discrete event simulation uses to move a patient-level health economic model through time.
Expected Net Benefit of Sampling
Expected net benefit of sampling (ENBS) is a proposed study's population expected value of sample information minus its expected total cost.
Expected Utility
Expected utility is the probability-weighted sum of the utilities of an option's outcomes, used in health decision analysis to rank choices under risk.