Bayesian Optimisation
Bayesian optimisation seeks the inputs that optimise a costly function, such as a model's fit to calibration targets, using a surrogate to pick each run.
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.
Beers Criteria
The Beers Criteria are the American Geriatrics Society's list of medicines best avoided in older adults, also used to evaluate quality of care and cost.
Behaviour Change Intervention
A behaviour change intervention is a coordinated set of behaviour change techniques aiming to change a health behaviour, judged by cost per health gain.
Behaviour Change Technique
A behaviour change technique (BCT) is the smallest replicable part of a health behaviour programme, such as goal setting, coded to cost what is delivered.
Behavioural Theory
Behavioural theory explains how limited attention, present bias and other biases push health and insurance choices away from full rationality.
Benefit Transfer
Benefit transfer reuses willingness-to-pay values from earlier studies, such as the value of a statistical life, to value health benefits in a new setting.
Benefit-Cost Ratio
Benefit-cost ratio (BCR) is a health programme's monetised benefits divided by its costs, in present values, used to summarise a cost-benefit analysis.
Best Supportive Care
Best supportive care (BSC) is symptom-directed care without anticancer treatment, used as a control arm in oncology trials and as a comparator in HTA.
Best-Worst Scaling
Best-worst scaling (BWS) is a stated preference method in which people pick the best and worst item in each set, to rank priorities or value health states.
Beta Distribution
The beta distribution is a probability distribution on values between zero and one, used in decision models to represent uncertainty in probabilities.
Beta Level
The predetermined acceptable probability of failing to detect a true effect, with one minus beta defining a study's statistical power.
Between-Patient Analysis
Between-patient analysis compares costs or outcomes across separate groups of patients, as in a parallel-group trial, rather than within the same patients.
Between-Subject Variation
Between-subject variation is how much costs or outcomes differ from one patient to another, as opposed to variation in one person's repeated measurements.
Bias-Variance Tradeoff
The bias-variance tradeoff is how cutting systematic error (bias) tends to raise sampling variance, as in choosing HTA survival curves or subgroup inputs.
Binomial Distribution
The binomial distribution models how many of a fixed number of patients have an event when each has the same probability and outcomes are independent.
Bioavailability
Bioavailability is the rate and extent to which an active drug reaches the systemic circulation, which sets the dose and drug cost of a target exposure.
Biological Therapy
Treatment using a medicinal product made from or derived from a biological source, assessed for a specific indication, delivery pathway and patient outcome.
Biomarker
A biomarker is a measured biological characteristic, such as a gene or protein, signalling disease or treatment response; HTA may tie treatment to it.
Biosimilar
A biosimilar is a biological medicine licensed as highly similar to an approved reference biologic, bringing price competition once its exclusivity ends.
Biosimilar Approval
Biosimilar approval is the regulatory licensing of a biosimilar shown to be highly similar to an approved reference biologic, so the two can compete.