Incremental Cost-Utility Ratio
The incremental cost-utility ratio (ICUR) is the ICER of a cost-utility analysis: extra cost over a comparator divided by extra QALYs gained.
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.
Incremental Effectiveness
Incremental effectiveness is the difference in health outcomes between an intervention and its comparator, calculated in a consistent outcome unit and comparison direction.
Incremental Net Benefit
The difference in expected net benefit between two competing interventions, found by converting the incremental health effect into money and subtracting incremental cost.
Incremental Net Monetary Benefit
Incremental net monetary benefit (INMB) is the extra health of an option over its comparator, valued at a threshold, minus the extra cost, per patient.
Independent Censoring
An assumption that, within the information used for a survival analysis, censoring does not convey additional information about a person’s unobserved event time.
Indifference Curve
An indifference curve is a curve joining combinations of two goods or health outcomes that a person values equally, showing the trade-offs they accept.
Indirect Comparison
An indirect comparison estimates, for HTA, how two treatments never trialled head to head compare, using each one's trials against a common comparator.
Indirect Treatment Comparison
Indirect treatment comparison (ITC) is the umbrella term for methods, such as NMA or MAIC, that compare treatments no trial has tested head to head.
Indirect Utility Assessment
Indirect utility assessment derives health state utilities by scoring patients' answers to a questionnaire such as the EQ-5D with a published value set.
Individual Patient Data Meta-Analysis
Individual patient data meta-analysis pools each trial participant's original record, not published summaries, to estimate treatment effects for HTA.
Individual Patient Simulation
Individual patient simulation is a modelling approach that generates separate patient histories under specified rules and aggregates their costs and health outcomes for a target population.
Inelastic Demand
Inelastic demand is demand with a price elasticity between zero and minus one, so use falls proportionally less than price rises, as for most medical care.
Information Asymmetry
Information asymmetry occurs when a patient, insurer, doctor or other health care party knows more than another, which can distort prices and use of care.
Information Bias
Information bias is systematic error in the exposure, outcome or cost data of a health study, arising from how the data are measured, recalled or recorded.
Informed Choice
Informed choice is a decision about a screening test or treatment based on relevant knowledge, consistent with the decision maker's values and acted upon.
Informed Consent for Research
Informed consent for research is a capable person's voluntary, understood agreement to join a study, the ethical gate for trial and registry evidence.
Instrumental Variable
An instrumental variable is a variable that changes treatment or exposure uptake while, under specified causal assumptions, being independent of potential outcomes and affecting the outcome only through that treatment or exposure.
Instrumental Variable Analysis
Instrumental variable analysis is a causal estimation approach that uses variation in treatment or exposure induced by a qualifying instrument to estimate an effect under explicit identification and modelling assumptions.
Intangible Cost
Intangible cost is the pain, distress and lost quality of life caused by illness or treatment, which has no market price and is often measured in QALYs.
Integer Programming
Integer programming chooses which indivisible health programmes or medicines to fund to maximise health gain, such as QALYs, within a fixed budget.