Process Capability
A statistical measure of how consistently a process produces output within specified acceptable limits, assessing whether it reliably meets targets.
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.
Producer Surplus
The difference between the price a producer receives and the minimum they would have accepted, the net benefit they gain from a transaction.
Producer Theory
The branch of microeconomic theory analysing how firms choose inputs and output levels to maximise profit given their costs and market conditions.
Product Limit Estimator
The formal statistical name for the Kaplan-Meier estimator, reflecting its calculation as a running product of conditional survival probabilities.
Production Possibility Frontier
A graph showing the maximum combinations of two goods or outcomes producible given a fixed set of resources and existing technology.
Productive Efficiency
A condition in which a given output level is produced using the minimum possible inputs, synonymous with technical efficiency.
Programme Budget
A budgeting approach that organises spending around specific programmes or services rather than departmental line items.
Programme Budgeting
A budgeting approach organising health spending around specific programmes or disease areas rather than input categories, allowing cross-programme comparison.
Progression-Free Survival
A time-to-event measure defined as the time from treatment start until either disease progression or death from any cause, whichever occurs first.
Propensity Score
The estimated probability that an individual would receive a particular treatment given their observed characteristics, used to balance confounders in observational studies.
Propensity Score Matching
A statistical technique pairing treated individuals with similar untreated individuals based on an estimated propensity score, balancing measured confounding variables.
Proportion of Days Covered
A quantitative adherence measure calculated as the proportion of days a patient had access to medication, accounting for overlapping supply more precisely than MPR.
Proportional Hazards Assumption
The Cox model assumption that the hazard ratio between two groups stays constant over follow-up, even as the absolute hazard rate changes.
Proportional Shortfall
A measure of disease severity calculated as the proportion, rather than absolute number, of expected quality-adjusted life years lost to a condition.
Prospective Risk Adjustment
A risk adjustment method using prior period diagnoses to predict a subsequent period's costs, unlike concurrent adjustment using same-period data.
Provider Payment
Provider payment refers to the methods and arrangements through which healthcare providers are paid for delivering services, including fee-for-service, capitation, bundled payments, salaries, global budgets and value-based payment.
Pseudo-Random Number
A number generated by a deterministic algorithm that approximates the statistical properties of true randomness, used because genuine randomness is hard to compute.
QALY Calculation Method
The process of computing quality-adjusted life years by multiplying time spent in a health state by its utility value, then summing across states.
QALY Gain
The increase in quality-adjusted life years attributable to an intervention, the difference between the QALYs expected under it and its comparator.
QR Decomposition
A matrix factorisation method that expresses a matrix as the product of an orthogonal matrix and an upper triangular matrix.