Cost-Plus Pricing
Cost-plus pricing sets the price of a medicine or health product as its estimated unit cost plus a profit mark-up, either a percentage or a fixed amount.
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.
Cost-to-Charge Ratio
The cost-to-charge ratio (CCR) is a hospital's reported costs divided by its billed charges, used to estimate costs from the charges on patient records.
Cost-Utility Analysis
Cost-utility analysis is an economic evaluation that measures health gains in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and reports cost per QALY gained.
Country-Specific Value Set
A country-specific value set is a set of utility weights, elicited from one country's general public, that turns EQ-5D or similar responses into utilities.
Coverage Decision
A coverage decision is a payer's or HTA body's formal ruling on whether a health technology will be funded, for which patients and on what conditions.
Coverage Error
Coverage error arises when the sampling frame of a health survey or register misses part of the target population or includes people outside it.
Coverage Expansion
Coverage expansion is a policy change that extends health cover to more people, adds services or cuts cost sharing, moving towards universal coverage.
Coverage Gap
A coverage gap is a band of drug spending that a plan covers little or not at all, best known as the Medicare Part D doughnut hole, which ended in 2025.
Coverage Policy
Coverage policy is the set of rules a health payer uses to decide which services and technologies it funds, for whom and what share of the cost it meets.
Cox Proportional Hazards
The Cox proportional hazards model is a semi-parametric survival regression that estimates hazard ratios without specifying the baseline hazard.
Cox-Snell Residual
A Cox-Snell residual is a survival model's fitted cumulative hazard at a patient's observed time, used to check overall fit against a unit exponential.
Cream Skimming
Cream skimming is when an insurer or provider attracts people expected to cost less than it is paid for them and deters those expected to cost more.
Credence Good
A credence good is a good or service whose quality or need a buyer cannot judge even after use, such as medical care, where the expert seller knows more.
Credentialing
Credentialing is how a hospital or health insurer verifies a clinician's licence, certification and disciplinary record before they treat its patients.
Credibility Assessment
An overall evaluation of whether a model's structure, evidence base, and validation results provide enough confidence to inform a real decision.
Credible Interval
A credible interval is a Bayesian range that contains an unknown parameter, such as a treatment effect, with a stated posterior probability, often 95%.
Credible Interval Estimation
The Bayesian process of calculating a range of plausible values for a parameter based on its estimated posterior probability distribution.
Criterion Validity
Criterion validity is the degree to which a measure's scores agree with a gold standard for the same concept, assessed at the same time or later.
Critical Appraisal
Critical appraisal is the structured judgement of whether a study, model or economic evaluation is sound and relevant enough to inform a health decision.
Critical Value
A critical value is a cutoff on a test statistic's reference distribution that defines a rejection boundary for a specified hypothesis test and error level.