Annuity Payment
A reimbursement structure paying a treatment's total cost to the manufacturer in a series of instalments over time, rather than as a single upfront sum.
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.
Clinical Benefit Rate
A cancer outcome measure combining complete response, partial response, and stable disease rates, giving a broader benefit picture than response rate alone.
Disease Control Rate
A cancer outcome measure combining complete response, partial response, and stable disease rates, characterising the proportion whose disease did not progress.
Dose Response
The relationship between the amount of a drug given and the magnitude of its resulting biological or clinical effect.
Half-Life
The time required for a drug's concentration in the body to fall by half, a key parameter determining dosing frequency.
Herd Immunity Threshold
The proportion of a population that must be immune to achieve herd immunity, mathematically related to a pathogen's basic reproduction number.
Objective Response Rate
The proportion of patients whose tumour shrinks by a predefined amount or disappears entirely following treatment, measured using standardised radiological criteria.
Overall Survival
A time-to-event measure defined as the time from treatment start, or trial randomisation, until death from any cause.
Pharmacokinetics
The study of how the body absorbs, distributes, metabolises, and eliminates a drug over time, covering bioavailability, clearance, and half-life.
Progression-Free Survival
A time-to-event measure defined as the time from treatment start until either disease progression or death from any cause, whichever occurs first.
Relative Dose Intensity
A measure comparing the dose intensity a patient actually received to the originally planned, full dose intensity, expressed as a percentage.
Steady State
A pharmacokinetic condition where a drug's concentration remains stable because the rate of administration equals the rate of elimination.
Therapeutic Index
A drug's safety margin, calculated as the ratio between the dose that produces toxicity and the dose producing the desired effect.
Vaccine Effectiveness
The degree to which a vaccine reduces disease risk under real-world conditions in a general population, unlike efficacy measured under trial conditions.
Vaccine Efficacy
The degree to which a vaccine reduces disease risk among vaccinated individuals under the controlled conditions of a clinical trial.