Consumer Sovereignty
Consumer sovereignty is the economic principle that individuals best judge their own welfare, so their preferences set the value of health care.
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.
Consumer Surplus
Consumer surplus is the most that buyers would pay for a good or service minus what they pay, measured as the area under the demand curve above the price.
Consumer-Directed Health Plan
A consumer-directed health plan (CDHP) is a US health plan pairing a high deductible with a tax-favoured account, such as an HSA or HRA, to pay for care.
Contact Rate
Contact rate is the expected number of defined, potentially transmission-relevant encounters an individual has per unit time in an infectious-disease model.
Contact Tracing
Contact tracing finds and follows up people exposed to an infectious case so they can be tested, treated or quarantined before infecting others.
Contamination
Contamination occurs when trial participants receive the other arm's intervention, usually controls getting the new one, diluting the measured effect.
Content Validity
Content validity is how far a health measure's items are relevant, comprehensive and understood for its construct, target population and context of use.
Contingency Table
A contingency table counts observations cross-classified by two or more categorical variables, such as trial arm by outcome or test result by disease.
Contingent Valuation
Contingent valuation (CV) is a stated preference survey method asking people what they would pay for, or accept to give up, a described change in health.
Contingent Valuation Method
The contingent valuation method is the survey protocol used to design, pretest, run and analyse questions asking people to value a health change in money.
Continuity of Care
Continuity of care is the extent to which a patient's care over time is joined up, through a known clinician, shared information or a consistent plan.
Continuous Coverage
Continuous coverage is health insurance held with no gap longer than a set limit, often 63 days in US law, which can shorten pre-existing exclusions.
Continuous Data
Continuous data are outcomes measured on a numerical scale that can take any value within a range, such as blood pressure, cost or utility.
Continuous Model
A continuous model is a decision model run in continuous time rather than fixed cycles, so health events can occur at any moment, governed by rates.
Continuous Quality Improvement
Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is an approach in which health services use systematic data and repeated tests of change to improve care.
Contract Curve
The contract curve is the set of Pareto-efficient allocations between two parties, such as hospitals, where no trade helps one without harming the other.
Contract Theory
Contract theory studies how contracts, such as provider payment rules, can align incentives when actions or information are hidden or cannot be verified.
Control Arm
A control arm is the trial group given placebo, no treatment, another dose or another treatment, against which outcomes on the new treatment are compared.
Control Chart
A control chart is a time-series plot of a health service measure with a centre line and control limits that separate routine variation from real change.
Control Variates
Control variates is a variance reduction method that corrects a Monte Carlo estimate, such as mean cost or QALYs, using a correlated output of known mean.