Demand Forecasting
The process of predicting future healthcare service demand based on historical utilisation, demographic trends, and other relevant factors.
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.
Demographic Adjustment
A risk adjustment method predicting expected costs based on basic characteristics, such as age and sex, without detailed clinical diagnosis information.
Departure Process
The pattern by which entities, such as patients, leave a discrete event simulation after completing the services or processes being modelled.
Dependent Censoring
A survival analysis situation in which the reason for censoring is related to a participant's underlying risk of the event, violating standard assumptions.
Derived Demand for Healthcare
The concept that demand for healthcare is not valued for its own sake but derives from an underlying demand for health itself.
Design Effect
A statistic quantifying how much a complex survey or clustered study's variance differs from what a simple random sample of the same size would give.
Determinant
A scalar value calculated from a square matrix that indicates properties including invertibility, scaling and the independence of its rows or columns.
Deterministic Model
A model in which all input parameters take single, fixed values, producing one point estimate of cost and effect, unlike a probabilistic model.
Deterministic Sensitivity Analysis
A sensitivity analysis varying one or more inputs at a time to fixed alternative values, holding others at base case, to observe the effect.
Deviance Residual
A model residual, used with generalised linear and survival models, constructed so its sum of squares equals the model's overall deviance statistic.
DFBETA
A regression diagnostic measuring how much a coefficient would change if a particular observation were removed, identifying disproportionately influential data points.
DFBETAS
A standardised version of the DFBETA diagnostic, scaled by its standard error, allowing influence of observations to be compared consistently across models.
Dfle Calculation
The process of computing disability-free life expectancy using a life table combining age-specific mortality rates with age-specific disability prevalence.
Diagnosis-Based Risk Score
A numerical estimate of expected future healthcare costs, calculated using documented medical diagnoses alongside demographic characteristics.
Diagnostic Accuracy
The overall ability of a diagnostic test to correctly classify individuals as having or not having a condition, summarised using sensitivity and specificity.
Difference-in-Differences
A quasi-experimental technique estimating a policy's causal effect by comparing the change in outcomes over time between an exposed and a comparable unexposed group.
Differential Discounting
The practice of applying different discount rates to costs and health outcomes within an economic evaluation, rather than discounting both at the same rate.
Direct Elicitation
A health state valuation approach in which respondents value a state directly, using techniques such as the standard gamble or time trade-off.
Direct Utility Assessment
The process of obtaining a health state utility value by asking a respondent to compare a described state against full health and death.
Dirichlet Distribution
A multivariate distribution representing uncertainty in a set of proportions that must sum to one, such as transition probabilities from a state.