Signaling Theory
Signaling theory explains how informed parties such as hospitals reveal hidden quality to patients and payers by actions costlier for low-quality types.
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.
Significance Level
The significance level is a prespecified upper bound on the probability that a valid statistical test rejects its null hypothesis when that hypothesis is true.
Simple Knowledge Organization System
Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C data standard for publishing vocabularies, such as health economics thesauri and code lists, as RDF.
Simpson Paradox
Simpson's paradox occurs when a treatment comparison that holds in every patient subgroup reverses or disappears once the subgroups are pooled together.
Simpson Rule
Simpson rule is a closed Newton-Cotes numerical integration formula that approximates a definite integral over pairs of equal subintervals by integrating quadratic interpolants through successive triples of function values.
Simulated Annealing
Simulated annealing is a stochastic search method, used to calibrate health economic models, that sometimes accepts a worse fit to escape local optima.
Simulated Treatment Comparison
Simulated treatment comparison (STC) is an HTA method that uses one trial's patient data to predict outcomes in another trial's population for comparison.
SIR Model
The SIR model is an epidemic model that sorts people into susceptible, infectious and recovered groups, used in health economics to value vaccination.
Six-Minute Walk Test
Six-minute walk test (6MWT) is a performance outcome that records distance walked in six minutes, used as an endpoint in heart and lung trials and in HTA.
Skewness
Skewness measures the asymmetry of a distribution around its mean, such as the long right tail that a few very costly patients give health care cost data.
Slope Index of Inequality
The slope index of inequality (SII) is an absolute measure of health inequality, the predicted gap between the top and bottom of a socioeconomic ranking.
Sobol Indices
Sobol indices are variance-based sensitivity measures giving the share of a health economic model output's variance due to each input and its interactions.
Sobol Sequence
A Sobol sequence is a deterministic low-discrepancy sequence that spreads parameter values evenly for quasi-Monte Carlo runs of health economic models.
Social Choice Theory
Social choice theory is the study of rules that combine individual preferences or judgements into one collective decision, such as a health care priority.
Social Health Insurance
Social health insurance (SHI) is compulsory health cover paid for by income-related contributions pooled in sickness funds or a national fund.
Social Opportunity Cost of Capital
The social opportunity cost of capital is the opportunity cost of public funds, the return on private investment that projects such as hospitals displace.
Social Return on Investment
Social return on investment (SROI) values a programme's health, social and environmental outcomes in money and compares the total with what it cost.
Social Welfare Function
A social welfare function (SWF) combines individual health or wellbeing into overall social welfare, setting how equality is weighed against the total.
Societal Perspective
The societal perspective is an economic evaluation viewpoint that counts all costs and outcomes, whoever bears them, including productivity and carer time.
SPARQL
SPARQL is the W3C query language and protocol for RDF graphs, used in health economics to retrieve linked facts such as trial arms, codes and unit costs.