Biomarker Endpoint
A biomarker endpoint is a trial outcome built on a measured biological marker, such as LDL cholesterol, which cost-utility models must convert into QALYs.
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.
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.
Biosimilar Pricing
Biosimilar pricing is how a biosimilar's price to health systems is set against its reference biologic, through discounts, tenders and funding rules.
Biosimilar Substitution
Biosimilar substitution is dispensing a biosimilar instead of a prescribed reference biologic without consulting the prescriber, where rules allow.
Bismarck Model
The Bismarck model is a health system of compulsory social health insurance: employers and employees pay income-related contributions to sickness funds.
Black Box Model
A black box model is a model whose workings cannot be inspected or understood, such as a locked cost-effectiveness model or a deep learning algorithm.
Blame-Free Reporting
Blame-free reporting lets health staff report patient safety incidents and near misses without fear of punishment, so learning targets system causes.
Blended Payment
Blended payment pays health care providers by mixing methods, such as capitation plus fee-for-service or case rates, so each offsets the others' flaws.
Blinding
Blinding (masking) keeps trial participants, clinicians, assessors or analysts unaware of assignment, limiting bias in effect, utility and cost estimates.
Block Randomization
Block randomisation assigns participants in small blocks with set numbers per arm in random order, keeping arms balanced throughout trials that inform HTA.
Body of Evidence
A body of evidence is all studies on one outcome of a guideline or HTA question, judged together; GRADE rates certainty as high, moderate, low or very low.
Bond Financing
Bond financing is borrowing for health by issuing bonds, debt repaid with interest over many years, so hospitals and other large costs can be paid for now.
Bootstrap Standard Error
Bootstrap standard error is the standard deviation of an estimate, such as mean trial cost, recalculated across many resamples of the observed data.
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is a resampling method that estimates sampling uncertainty in trial costs, QALYs and net benefit from patient samples drawn with replacement.
Borrowing For Health
Borrowing for health is when a household takes on debt to pay for health care, a coping strategy that signals weak financial risk protection.
Bottom-Up Cost-of-Illness
Bottom-Up Cost-of-Illness estimates a disease's economic burden by valuing patient-level resource use at unit costs and scaling it to the population.
Bottom-Up Costing
Bottom-up costing estimates the cost of care by recording each patient's use of resources and multiplying every item by its unit cost.
Bounded Rationality Concept
The bounded rationality concept holds that patients, clinicians and payers with limited information, time and computation settle for good enough options.
Brain Drain
Brain drain is the emigration of trained health workers from poorer to richer countries, costing source countries their care and publicly funded training.