Absorbing State
An absorbing state is a state in a Markov model that patients cannot leave once they enter it, usually death, so the whole cohort eventually ends there.
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.
Accelerated Approval
Accelerated approval is an FDA pathway that approves medicines for serious conditions on a surrogate endpoint, with confirmatory trials to verify benefit.
Accelerated Failure Time Model
An accelerated failure time (AFT) model is a survival model in which treatment or another factor stretches or shrinks time to an event by a time ratio.
Access Negotiation
Access negotiation is the process in which a health technology supplier and a payer agree the price, eligibility and other conditions for patient access.
Acquired Treatment Resistance
Acquired treatment resistance is the loss of a cancer treatment's effect after initial response or disease control, as the tumour adapts and progresses.
Active Choice
Active choice is a choice architecture design that asks people to state a decision, such as on organ donation or vaccination, instead of setting a default.
Active Comparator
An active comparator is an existing treatment, rather than placebo, that a new health technology is compared with in HTA and economic evaluation.
Activity-Based Budgeting
Activity-based budgeting (ABB) builds a health service budget from forecast service volumes, the activities each needs and each activity's cost per unit.
Activity-Based Costing
Activity-based costing (ABC) is a method that assigns resource costs to activities, then to patients or services in proportion to the activities they use.
Adaptive Value of Information
Adaptive value of information applies VOI analysis to staged research, re-valuing further data at each interim look to decide whether to continue.
Addiction Treatment Economics
Addiction treatment economics is the economic evaluation of treatments for substance use disorders, weighing their costs against health and crime outcomes.
ADME Studies
ADME studies measure how a drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolised and excreted, informing dose adjustments for organ impairment and drug interactions.
Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product
An advanced therapy medicinal product (ATMP) is an EU-regulated gene, cell or tissue-based medicine, often given once, whose lasting value HTA must judge.
Adverse Event
An adverse event (AE) is any unfavourable medical occurrence after treatment, caused by it or not; in patient safety, an injury caused by medical care.
Adverse Event Rate
Adverse event rate (AE rate) is the count of adverse events, or of patients with one, divided by the patients or person-time at risk in a stated period.
Adverse Selection
Adverse selection occurs when people who know they are higher risk buy more health or life insurance, which can raise premiums and drive out lower risks.
Affordability
Affordability is whether a payer or household can meet the cost of health care from available resources without displacing other care or causing hardship.
Affordability Threshold
An affordability threshold is the budget impact level above which a payer flags a new technology for special handling, even if it is cost-effective.
Age Weighting
Age weighting values a year of healthy life by the age at which it is lived, as in the original GBD DALY, which gave years in young adulthood most weight.
Agent-Based Model
An agent-based model (ABM) simulates individuals as agents that follow rules and interact, so outcomes such as infections, costs and QALYs emerge.