Half-Life
The time required for a drug's concentration in the body to fall by half, a key parameter determining dosing frequency.
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.
Harm Rate
A measure of how frequently patients experience actual harm from healthcare received, typically identified through methods more comprehensive than voluntary reporting.
Harrell C-Index
A survival model discrimination measure generalising the ROC area under curve to time-to-event data, the probability the model ranks patients correctly.
Hazard Function
A function describing the instantaneous risk of an event at a given point in time, conditional on having survived to that point.
Hazard Rate
The instantaneous probability of an event at a specific point in time, given survival without the event up to then, on a continuous scale.
Hazard Ratio
A measure comparing the instantaneous risk of an event in one group relative to another, commonly estimated using a Cox model.
Hazard-to-Probability Conversion
The mathematical transformation converting an instantaneous hazard rate into the probability of an event occurring over a specific discrete time interval.
Health Behaviour
An action or pattern of action that affects an individual's health, healthcare use or response to prevention and treatment.
Health Capital
The stock of health an individual holds at a given time, modelled as a durable asset that yields healthy time and depreciates with age.
Health Depreciation
The rate at which an individual's stock of health capital declines over time, generally assumed to accelerate with age.
Health Insurance
Health insurance is a financing arrangement that pools prepaid contributions and covers specified healthcare costs when insured members need care, thereby sharing financial risk across the insured population.
Health Investment
Resources an individual or system devotes to maintaining or improving health capital, including healthcare use, exercise, and other health-promoting behaviour.
Health Production Function
A theoretical relationship describing how inputs such as healthcare, education, income, and lifestyle combine to produce health as an output.
Health State Utility Value
A number, typically anchored between zero for dead and one for full health, representing the preference-based value of a specific health state.
Health State Valuation
The process of assigning a preference-based utility value to a described health state, typically using a choice-based or rating-based method.
Health System Financing
Health system financing comprises the arrangements through which money for health is raised, pooled and used to purchase services in pursuit of access, equity, financial protection and efficiency.
Health Technology Assessment
A multidisciplinary assessment of a health technology’s clinical, economic, organisational, social and ethical implications undertaken to support policy and practice decisions.
Health Worker Density
A measure of the number of healthcare workers, such as physicians or nurses, available relative to the population they serve.
Health-Adjusted Life Year
A general term for outcome measures, including the QALY and DALY, combining length of life with a weighting for quality or disability into one unit.
Healthcare Production Function
A theoretical relationship describing how medical inputs, such as physician time, tests, and drugs, combine to produce healthcare services or outcomes.