Cost Minimisation
An approach to selecting among interventions already shown to produce equivalent outcomes, in which the choice reduces to the lowest-cost option.
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.
Cost per QALY
A measure of value for money in cost-utility analysis, calculated as incremental cost divided by the quality-adjusted life years gained relative to a comparator.
Cost per QALY Threshold
The maximum cost per quality-adjusted life year a health system is willing to pay for a health gain, used as the decision criterion in cost-utility analysis.
Cost Valuation
The process of assigning a monetary value to identified units of resource use, such as bed-days multiplied by unit cost.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Cost-benefit analysis is a full economic evaluation that values the differences in the costs and consequences of healthcare alternatives in monetary terms so that their net social value can be compared.
Cost-Consequence Analysis
An evaluation that displays each option’s costs and range of outcomes separately, allowing decision-makers to consider them without a combined summary result.
Cost-Effectiveness
A property describing the relationship between an intervention's cost and its health effect relative to an alternative, usually summarised as an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio.
Cost-Effectiveness Acceptability Curve (CEAC)
A graph plotting the probability an intervention is cost-effective against a range of possible values for the cost-effectiveness threshold.
Cost-Effectiveness Acceptability Frontier
A curve showing, across willingness-to-pay thresholds, the probability that the option with the highest expected net benefit at each threshold is truly optimal.
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
Cost-effectiveness analysis compares healthcare alternatives by relating differences in their costs to differences in outcomes measured using the same natural unit, such as cases prevented or life-years gained.
Cost-Effectiveness Frontier
The set of non-dominated interventions on a cost-effectiveness plane, connecting options offering the best available combination of cost and effect.
Cost-Effectiveness Plane
A graph plotting an intervention's incremental cost against its incremental effect relative to a comparator, cost on the vertical axis and effect on the horizontal.
Cost-Effectiveness Threshold
A cost-effectiveness threshold is a benchmark used to judge whether the additional health produced by an intervention is worth its additional cost, usually expressed as an amount per QALY or another unit of health outcome.
Cost-Minimisation Analysis
Cost-minimisation analysis compares the costs of healthcare alternatives only after reliable evidence shows that their relevant outcomes do not differ meaningfully.
Cost-of-Illness Study
A cost-of-illness study is a descriptive economic analysis that identifies, measures and values the healthcare resource use, patient and caregiver costs, productivity losses and other economic consequences attributable to a disease, injury or risk factor in a defined population and period.
Cost-to-Charge Ratio
A ratio, typically from hospital accounting reports, used to convert billed charges into an estimate of the actual cost of providing a service.
Cost-Utility Analysis
Cost-utility analysis is a full economic evaluation that compares healthcare alternatives by relating differences in their costs to differences in preference-weighted health outcomes, most commonly quality-adjusted life years.
Cox Proportional Hazards
A widely used survival model estimating covariate effects, such as treatment, on the hazard rate while leaving the baseline hazard function unspecified.
Cox-Snell Residual
A residual used to check a survival model's overall fit, which should follow a standard exponential distribution if the fitted model is correct.
Credible Interval
A range of values, calculated within a Bayesian framework, believed to contain a parameter's true value with a specified posterior probability.