Decision Criteria
Decision criteria are the factors an HTA body weighs in a funding recommendation, such as clinical benefit, cost-effectiveness and severity.
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.
Decision Curve Analysis
Decision curve analysis (DCA) plots the net benefit of a prediction model or test across risk thresholds against treating all or no patients.
Decision Fatigue Concept
The decision fatigue concept holds that decision quality falls after a long run of choices, as when clinicians treat patients differently late in a shift.
Decision Maker
A decision maker is the person or body, such as NICE, whose choice an economic evaluation informs and whose objectives, budget and values it reflects.
Decision Making
Decision making in health care is the process by which payers, HTA bodies and clinicians choose between options using evidence, costs, criteria and values.
Decision Node
A decision node is a point in a decision tree, drawn as a square, where the decision maker chooses between options and no probabilities are attached.
Decision Problem
A decision problem is the choice an economic evaluation or model must inform, stated as population, options compared, outcomes, costs and decision maker.
Decision Rule
A decision rule is an explicit criterion, such as an ICER threshold or net benefit, for choosing between healthcare interventions in economic evaluation.
Decision Support
Decision support is software or a structured tool that gives clinicians or patients relevant evidence when a health care choice is being made.
Decision Tree
A decision tree is a branching model used in economic evaluation: strategies, chance events and end points give each option's expected costs and QALYs.
Decision Tree Model
A decision tree model is an economic evaluation model whose branches map each option's patient pathways to give expected costs and QALYs per strategy.
Decision Uncertainty
Decision uncertainty is the probability that the option preferred on current evidence is not the best, given uncertainty in costs and health effects.
Decommissioning
Decommissioning is the formal step that ends funding or provision of a health service or technology, in full or for some patients, once judged low value.
Deductible
A deductible is the amount an insured person must pay for covered health care in a period before the insurance plan starts to pay its share.
Deep Learning Health
Deep learning health, or deep learning in health care, uses many-layered neural networks on images, records and text for diagnosis and risk prediction.
Default Effect
The default effect is the tendency to stay with a pre-selected option, so opt-out schemes for organ donation or HIV testing raise uptake over opt-in.
Degrees of Freedom
Degrees of freedom (df) count values left free to vary after estimation and set the t, chi-squared or F curve for tests in trials and meta-analyses.
Deliberative Process
A deliberative process is structured group discussion where experts and stakeholders weigh evidence and values to guide HTA or priority-setting decisions.
Delphi Method
The Delphi method is an expert survey run in anonymous rounds with group feedback, used in health economics to agree judgements or estimate model inputs.
Delta Method
The delta method approximates the variance of a function of estimated parameters, such as an ICER or mean survival, using a first-order Taylor expansion.