Best Practice
Best practice in health care is an intervention shown to be effective and efficient in one setting that other providers could adopt with similar results.
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.
Best Price
Best price is the lowest US price a manufacturer offers almost any buyer for a brand-name drug in a quarter, used to set its Medicaid rebate.
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-Study Heterogeneity
Between-study heterogeneity is variation in effects across trials in a meta-analysis beyond chance, so one pooled effect may not fit every HTA setting.
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.
Beveridge Model
The Beveridge model is a health system funded mainly by general taxation, with universal entitlement and largely public provision, as in the UK NHS.
Bias
Bias is systematic error that pushes a treatment effect or cost estimate in economic evaluation away from the true value; larger samples do not remove it.
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.
Bibliographic Database
A bibliographic database is an indexed set of records describing published research, such as MEDLINE or Embase, searched to find studies for reviews.
Big Data
Big data is a term for very large, varied and fast-growing health datasets, such as linked records, claims and genomic data, that need specialised methods.
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.
Biobank Data
Biobank data are stored biological samples and participant measurements linked to health records, used in health economics to estimate costs and outcomes.
Bioequivalence
Bioequivalence means two products with the same active ingredient have rates and extents of absorption within preset limits, the basis of generic approval.
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.