Production Possibility Frontier
The production possibility frontier (PPF) shows the largest combinations of two outputs, such as health in two patient groups, that fixed resources allow.
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.
Productive Efficiency
Productive efficiency is producing a health service or outcome at the lowest feasible cost, wasting no inputs and combining them in the least-cost mix.
Progression-Free Survival
Progression-free survival (PFS) is the time from randomisation to cancer progression or death, the trial endpoint behind the progression-free state in HTA.
Property Rights
Property rights are entitlements to use a resource, exclude others, take its income and transfer it, as with medicine patents or pharmacy contracts.
Proportional Hazards Assumption
The proportional hazards assumption is that the hazard ratio between groups, such as trial arms, is constant over follow-up while each hazard may change.
Pseudo-Random Number
A pseudo-random number is a value produced by a deterministic algorithm whose sequence is designed to exhibit specified statistical properties of random draws.
Queuing Model
A queuing model is a mathematical representation of how arrivals, service times, capacity, and service rules generate waiting, congestion, and throughput in a service system.
Random Number Generation
Random number generation supplies the uncertain draws used in probabilistic sensitivity analysis, microsimulation, discrete-event simulation, bootstrap procedures, and other stochastic analyses.
Random Parameter Model
A random parameter model, or mixed logit, is a discrete choice model in which preference weights vary across people, estimated as a mean and a spread.
Random Sampling
Random sampling selects members of a population by chance, giving each a known, non-zero probability of selection, so sample estimates can be generalised.
Rate-to-Probability Conversion
Rate-to-probability conversion turns an event rate, such as deaths per person-year, into the probability of the event within one cycle of a Markov model.
Reference Case
A reference case is the set of methods, such as perspective, outcome measure and discounting, that HTA bodies like NICE expect economic evaluations to use.
Reference Case Requirement
Reference case requirement is one rule in an HTA reference case, such as NICE's 3.5% discount rate, fixing a method like perspective or outcome measure.
Reference Standard
The reference standard is the best available method for deciding whether a target condition is present, against which a test's accuracy is judged.
Regression Analysis
Regression analysis is a set of statistical methods estimating how an outcome such as cost, QALYs or event risk varies with treatment and patient factors.
Relative Survival
Relative survival is patients' observed survival divided by the expected survival of a matched general population, used in cancer registries and models.
Relative Survival Model
A statistical model estimating disease-specific survival by comparing observed survival against expected general population survival, without individual cause-of-death data.
Resource
Resource, in health economics, means any scarce input such as staff time, medicines, beds or equipment, whose use in one place denies it to other uses.
Response Surface Methodology
Response surface methodology fits a polynomial to planned runs of a health economic model so outputs such as net benefit can be predicted and optimised.
Restricted Cubic Spline
A restricted cubic spline is a smooth piecewise cubic function of a continuous predictor constrained to be linear beyond its outer knots, allowing regression models to represent nonlinear associations without prescribing one global polynomial shape.