Terms used to compare the costs and health effects of alternative interventions and judge value for money.
The cost-effectiveness frontier is the boundary of feasible strategies whose expected cost and effect combinations are not ruled out by strict or extended dominance under a specified decision framework.
A ranked list comparing incremental cost-effectiveness ratios across many separate studies, intended to help prioritise resource allocation across a health system.
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.
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 compares the costs of healthcare alternatives only after reliable evidence shows that their relevant outcomes do not differ meaningfully.
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.
The annual percentage applied to future costs or health outcomes to express them in present-value terms and permit consistent comparison across time.
Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis evaluates how a health intervention changes both total health and its distribution across socially relevant population groups, including the distribution of health opportunity costs.