Control Chart
A control chart is a time-series plot of a health service measure with a centre line and control limits that separate routine variation from real change.
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.
Conversion Factor
Conversion factor (CF) is the money amount per relative value unit that turns fee schedule relative values, such as Medicare RVUs, into payment amounts.
Copayment
A copayment (copay) is a fixed amount an insured person pays for a covered health service, such as USD 20 per visit, unlike percentage-based coinsurance.
Cost Containment
Cost containment is the use of policies such as budget caps, payment controls and patient charges to hold down the level or growth of health spending.
Cost Sharing
Cost sharing is the part of the cost of covered care that an insured patient pays directly, through deductibles, co-payments or coinsurance, not premiums.
Cost Shifting
Cost shifting is the transfer of health care costs from one payer or sector to another, as when hospitals raise private prices after public payment cuts.
Cost-Based Reimbursement
Cost-based reimbursement is a provider payment method in which a payer pays a hospital or other provider the costs it incurred, settled after care.
Coverage Decision
A coverage decision is a payer's or HTA body's formal ruling on whether a health technology will be funded, for which patients and on what conditions.
Coverage Expansion
Coverage expansion is a policy change that extends health cover to more people, adds services or cuts cost sharing, moving towards universal coverage.
Coverage Gap
A coverage gap is a band of drug spending that a plan covers little or not at all, best known as the Medicare Part D doughnut hole, which ended in 2025.
Coverage Policy
Coverage policy is the set of rules a health payer uses to decide which services and technologies it funds, for whom and what share of the cost it meets.
Cream Skimming
Cream skimming is when an insurer or provider attracts people expected to cost less than it is paid for them and deters those expected to cost more.
Credentialing
Credentialing is how a hospital or health insurer verifies a clinician's licence, certification and disciplinary record before they treat its patients.
Cross-Price Elasticity
Cross-price elasticity measures how demand for one good responds to a change in another good's price: positive for substitutes, negative for complements.
Data Analytics
Data analytics is the use of statistical and computational methods on health data to describe what happened, predict outcomes and guide decisions.
Data Envelopment Analysis
Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a linear programming method that scores hospitals and other health care units on technical efficiency against peers.
Data Pipeline
A data pipeline is an automated analysis workflow that moves health data from source systems through cleaning and checks into inputs for economic models.
Data Security
Data security is the set of technical, physical and administrative safeguards that keep health data confidential, unaltered and available when needed.
Days in Accounts Receivable
Days in accounts receivable (AR days) is a provider's net receivables divided by average daily net patient revenue, giving days of revenue still unpaid.
De-Identification
De-identification is the removal or alteration of identifiers in health data, such as names, exact dates and postcodes, to lower re-identification risk.