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.
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.
Markov microsimulation is an individual-level state-transition modeling method that simulates each person's sequence of health states over time using transition probabilities that may depend on current state, personal characteristics, time, and explicitly retained history.
A Markov model is a memoryless state-transition model used in economic evaluation: people move between health states each cycle, accruing costs and QALYs.
The Marshallian demand curve is a demand curve showing how much of a good, such as health care, a person buys at each price with money income held fixed.
A martingale residual is a patient's observed events minus those a fitted Cox survival model expected, used to check the functional form of covariates.
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) fits models such as survival curves by choosing the parameter values that make the observed data most probable.
A measure of central tendency obtained, in its arithmetic form, by dividing the sum of values by their count; a population mean is the corresponding expected value.
The arithmetic average of the absolute differences between numerical predictions and their corresponding observed values, expressed in the outcome’s units.
The mean difference (MD) is the difference between two groups' average values on one continuous scale, the usual effect measure for continuous outcomes.
Mean squared error is the average of squared differences between predictions or estimates and their corresponding observed or reference values, evaluated over a specified set or sampling process.
Mechanism design uses game theory to set rules, such as auctions, tenders or matching schemes, under which self-interested choices serve a chosen goal.
Mediation analysis is a statistical method that splits a treatment's effect on health or costs into a direct effect and an indirect effect via a mediator.
Memorylessness is the property that the chance of the next event does not depend on time already waited, as in Markov models and exponential survival.
The broad application of health economic evaluation to mental health conditions and treatment, spanning prevention, psychotherapy, medication, and specialist psychiatric services.
The method of moments estimates a distribution's parameters by equating its mean and variance to observed values, often to fit decision model inputs.
Metropolis-Hastings is a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that samples the posterior of health economic model inputs by accepting or rejecting proposals.
Micro-costing is a costing method that lists each resource a health service uses, such as staff minutes and consumables, and values each with a unit cost.
Microsimulation is a modelling method that follows simulated people one at a time, so each person's traits and past events shape their own costs and QALYs.
Missing at random (MAR) is a missing data mechanism where, given observed data, the chance a cost or outcome is missing is unrelated to unseen values.
Missing completely at random (MCAR) is a missing data mechanism in which the chance a cost or outcome is missing is unrelated to any data, seen or unseen.
Unobserved or unavailable values required for a specified analysis, whose consequences depend on the pattern, mechanism and target estimand.