Occupancy Rate
Occupancy rate (bed occupancy) is the percentage of a hospital's available staffed beds that hold inpatients, averaged from daily bed counts over a period.
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.
Odds Ratio
The odds ratio (OR) is the odds of an outcome in one group divided by the odds in another, a common effect measure for binary outcomes in trials and HTA.
One-Way Sensitivity Analysis
One-way sensitivity analysis (OWSA) varies one model input at a time, holding the rest at base case, to show which inputs drive cost-effectiveness results.
Ontology
An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a domain's concepts and their relations, used in health economics to code, pool and reason over data.
Opportunity Cost
Opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative given up when a resource is put to one use; in health care, usually health lost elsewhere.
Optimal Sample Size
A study sample size selected to meet a stated design objective, such as adequate power or precision, or to maximise the expected value of information after accounting for research costs and decision delays.
Optimal Taxation
Optimal taxation is the branch of welfare economics that designs taxes to maximise social welfare given revenue needs and behaviour, as with tobacco taxes.
Ordinal Scaling
Ordinal scaling ranks health states or responses, such as EQ-5D levels, with unknown gaps, so medians are meaningful but sums and means of codes are not.
Ordinal Utility
Ordinal utility is utility that records only how a person ranks options, such as two treatments, not how much one option is preferred to another.
Orthogonal Design
An experimental design for a choice experiment in which attribute levels are varied independently, so each attribute's effect on preference can be separated statistically.
Orthogonal Rotation
Orthogonal rotation is a factor analysis step that turns factor axes to simplify loadings while keeping factors uncorrelated, as in health questionnaires.
Out-of-Pocket Cost
Out-of-pocket cost is what a household pays directly for health care that no insurer or public scheme meets or repays, such as charges or private care.
Outcome Measure
An outcome measure is an instrument or data rule quantifying a result of care, such as survival or restored function, to judge care quality and value.
Outcomes Research
Outcomes research, often joined with health economics as HEOR, studies the end results of health care, such as survival, function and quality of life.
Overall Survival
Overall survival (OS) is the time from randomisation or another set start to death from any cause, a final endpoint driving life-years and QALYs in HTA.
Overfitting
Overfitting is when a cost, risk or utility model fits chance noise in its development data, so it predicts worse for new patients than its fit suggests.
Oxford Hip Score
Oxford Hip Score (OHS) is a 12-item patient-reported measure of hip pain and function, scored 0 to 48, used as the hip replacement outcome in NHS PROMs.
Oxford Knee Score
Oxford Knee Score (OKS) is a 12-item patient-reported measure of knee pain and function, scored 0 to 48, used to judge knee replacement in NHS PROMs.
P-Value
A p-value is the probability, if the null hypothesis and model held, of a result at least as extreme as observed, such as a trial cost or QALY difference.
Pairwise Deletion
Pairwise deletion is a missing data method that computes each correlation or covariance from all patients observed on both variables, so sample sizes vary.