Discrete Model
A model in which time advances in fixed, distinct steps, such as one-year cycles, rather than flowing continuously.
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.
Disease Control Rate
A cancer outcome measure combining complete response, partial response, and stable disease rates, characterising the proportion whose disease did not progress.
Distribution Fitting
The statistical process of identifying which probability distribution and parameters best represent the observed variation or uncertainty in a model input.
Distributional Cost-Effectiveness
An extension of cost-effectiveness analysis examining how an intervention's costs and health effects are distributed across population subgroups, such as by income.
Dominance
A relationship between two interventions in which one is both less costly and more effective, making the other an inferior choice regardless of threshold.
Dominance Analysis
The systematic process of comparing interventions to identify which are dominated, strictly or through extended dominance, before calculating incremental cost-effectiveness ratios.
Dose Response
The relationship between the amount of a drug given and the magnitude of its resulting biological or clinical effect.
Dynamic Model
A model representing how a system's variables change over time in response to feedback and interaction among components, unlike a static model.
Dynamic Programming Health
An optimisation technique solving complex sequential decision problems by breaking them into smaller, nested subproblems solved in relation to one another.
Dynamic Transmission Model
An epidemiological model representing how infection risk for a susceptible individual depends on current population prevalence, capturing feedback such as herd immunity.
Economic Evaluation
Economic evaluation compares the costs and outcomes of healthcare alternatives to inform decisions about value and limited resource allocation.
Effect Size
A quantitative measure of a phenomenon's magnitude, such as the difference between two groups, expressed to allow comparison across studies using different scales.
Effect Size Estimation
The statistical process of calculating a quantitative measure of a treatment effect's magnitude, often standardised to allow comparison across differing measurement scales.
Effective Sample Size
The sample size a simple random sample would need to match the precision of an actual sample from a more complex design, such as clustered.
Efficiency
Efficiency describes how well scarce resources are used to produce valued outputs or outcomes, including whether resources are used without avoidable waste and whether they are allocated among competing uses in a way that best advances stated objectives.
Efficiency Frontier
The boundary formed by non-dominated interventions plotted by cost and effect, showing the best attainable outcome at each level of spending.
Efficiency Frontier Analysis
A method identifying the best-observed combinations of inputs and outputs among comparable units, forming a frontier against which all others are benchmarked.
Efficiency Frontier Method
An analytical approach that identifies the efficiency frontier among a set of interventions to determine which non-dominated options warrant incremental comparison.
Efficient Design
An experimental design built to maximise the statistical information obtained from a given number of choice tasks.
Eigenvalue
A mathematical quantity indicating the amount of variance explained by its corresponding direction, used in factor analysis to decide how many factors to keep.