Scitovsky Paradox
The Scitovsky paradox is a welfare economics result in which a policy and its reversal both pass the Kaldor-Hicks test used in cost-benefit analysis.
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.
Scope Efficiency
Scope efficiency is whether a hospital or health system saves cost by providing several services together instead of in separate, specialised units.
Screening Economics
The economic assessment of a screening programme’s full pathway, comparing its costs, health benefits, harms, budget implications and opportunity costs with feasible alternatives.
Screening Theory
Screening theory explains how an insurer or payer that cannot observe risk or cost offers a menu of contracts so each type reveals itself by its choice.
SEIR Model
The SEIR model is a transmission model that adds an exposed, not yet infectious stage to the SIR model, used to evaluate vaccines and outbreak control.
Selection Model
A selection model handles missing trial data by modelling the outcome alongside the chance each value is observed, allowing for data missing not at random.
Self-Control Concept
The management of conflict between immediate incentives or effort and longer-term goals, especially when the timing of a choice changes what a person prefers to do.
Sensitivity Analysis
Sensitivity analysis tests whether a health economic model's results and decision change when uncertain inputs, assumptions or model structure are varied.
Sequential Analysis
Sequential analysis tests trial or safety data as they accumulate and stops once preset evidence boundaries are crossed, not at a fixed sample size.
Sequential Monte Carlo
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) tracks a sequence of probability distributions with weighted samples to calibrate health models and update them with data.
Shadow Price
The implicit value of a resource with no observable market price, reflecting the opportunity cost of using it in a particular way.
Shadow Price of Health
The shadow price of health is the health a fixed budget gains from one more pound spent at the margin; its reciprocal is the cost-effectiveness threshold.
Shadow Price of Labour
The shadow price of labour, or shadow wage, is a shadow price that values staff and volunteer time in health appraisal at its social opportunity cost.
Shared Frailty
Shared frailty is an unobserved random effect, shared by all patients in a cluster such as one hospital, that scales their hazard in survival analysis.
Signaling
Signaling is a costly, visible action by which an informed party, such as a hospital, credibly reveals hidden quality to patients or insurers.
Signaling Theory
Signaling theory explains how informed parties such as hospitals reveal hidden quality to patients and payers by actions costlier for low-quality types.
Significance Level
The significance level is a prespecified upper bound on the probability that a valid statistical test rejects its null hypothesis when that hypothesis is true.
Simpson Rule
Simpson rule is a closed Newton-Cotes numerical integration formula that approximates a definite integral over pairs of equal subintervals by integrating quadratic interpolants through successive triples of function values.
Simulated Annealing
Simulated annealing is a stochastic search method, used to calibrate health economic models, that sometimes accepts a worse fit to escape local optima.
SIR Model
The SIR model is an epidemic model that sorts people into susceptible, infectious and recovered groups, used in health economics to value vaccination.