Skip to content Economic reasoning foundations 10 topics
Opportunity cost the value of the best alternative forgone; why fixed budgets make every choice a displacement Discounting and time preference present values, the 3.5% Green Book/NICE rate Analysis perspective payer vs provider vs societal: whose costs count Time horizon how long to count costs and effects, and horizon gaming Marginal vs average cost why freeing a bed doesn't save its average cost Cash-releasing vs non-cash-releasing savings the honesty test for every "time saved" claim Sensitivity analysis tornado diagrams; which assumption carries your case Probabilistic sensitivity analysis Monte Carlo, CEACs, probability of being right Expected value of perfect information pricing the pilot before you run it Dominance and the efficiency frontier eliminating options nobody should pick Outcome measures 9 topics
Quality-adjusted life year (QALY) the common currency of health value Disability-adjusted life year (DALY) the burden-side mirror; global health's metric EQ-5D the instrument behind most QALY utility weights Incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) extra cost per extra unit of health Willingness-to-pay thresholds NICE £20–30k/QALY and the world's other lines Net monetary benefit (NMB) value minus cost, done properly Life-years gained survival math, and the evLYG equity variant Health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) population-level healthy-years accounting QALY shortfall and severity modifiers why sicker populations' QALYs count more Economic analysis types 8 topics
Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) cost per natural unit of outcome Cost-utility analysis (CUA) cost per QALY; comparing unlike interventions Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) everything in money; Green Book NPV Cost-minimization analysis (CMA) cheapest option, after proving equivalence Cost-consequence analysis (CCA) the disaggregated table; NICE's preference for digital health Budget impact analysis (BIA) affordability, as distinct from value Return on investment (ROI) the shared metric, with declared parameters Social return on investment (SROI) monetizing what markets don't price Health system operational economics 15 topics
Bed days saved the workhorse benefit, and its valuation traps Length of stay the hospital's cycle time Readmission rate the health system's change failure rate Did-not-attend (DNA) rate missed appointments; the purest waste metric Emergency attendance avoidance upstream intervention economics National tariff and unit costs the NHS price book and costing infrastructure Referral to treatment (RTT) the 18-week standard as a lead-time metric Waiting list impact converting saved hours into patients seen Practitioner time valuing bottleneck capacity, not wages Workforce retention turnover costs and burnout economics Avoidable outsourcing costs repatriating premium-rate work Downstream resource optimization unblocking the role everyone waits on Earlier intervention the economics of treating before progression Value-generating capacity (operational turnaround) minting capacity without hiring Hard cash-releasing savings (deficit defense) deleting budget lines; the CFO's metric HTA frameworks and prevention economics 7 topics
Health technology assessment (HTA) NICE, ICER (US), CADTH: who decides what's worth buying NICE Evidence Standards Framework risk-tiered evidence requirements for digital health Germany's DiGA fast-track apps on prescription; provisional listing with an evidence deadline Number needed to treat (NNT) effort-per-benefit units that keep claims honest Prevention economics why prevention is cost-effective but rarely cost-saving Screening economics Wilson–Jungner, PPV collapse at low prevalence, alert fatigue Avoided downstream costs cost offsets and the rules that make them credible Software engineering and digital delivery 11 topics
Cost of delay £/week or QALYs/week of non-delivery; the master bridge metric DORA metrics delivery performance, translated into health-economics terms Flow metrics Little's Law, WIP, flow efficiency; the shared queueing math of hospitals and pipelines WSJF and CD3 value-density prioritization; the backlog as a QALY league table SPACE and DevEx multi-dimensional productivity; the EQ-5D lesson for engineering metrics Technical debt principal, interest, and chronic-disease economics for codebases Total cost of ownership (TCO) maintenance is 50–80%; the naive-drug-price error in software Cloud unit economics (FinOps) cost per unit of output; the digital service's reference cost Build vs buy risk-adjusted comparison with the delay term priced Benefits realization auditing that forecast benefits actually happened GDS service metrics cost per transaction, satisfaction, completion, take-up AI developer productivity Copilot RCT vs METR RCT; efficacy vs effectiveness AI return on investment the 95%-no-return finding and what the 5% did differently Inference unit economics cost per token, and modeling relentless price decline AI quality metrics hallucination rates as harm rates with a price Clinical AI evaluation sensitivity, specificity, AUROC, and why prevalence rules the economics AI regulatory evaluation FDA SaMD, PCCPs, and the economics of model updates Consumer health apps and devices 10 topics
Engagement metrics engagement as clinical dose Retention and churn the law of attrition; retention curves as treatment windows Activation and uptake the front gates of the value funnel Adherence and persistence MPR, PDC, effective engagement, minimum effective dose Patient-reported outcomes PROMs, PREMs, and the MCID honesty bar Digital endpoints and biomarkers from sensor telemetry to regulator-grade evidence Wearable validation MAPE, agreement statistics, wear-time, completeness Remote patient monitoring economics CPT code stacks and hospital-at-home substitution Health app unit economics CAC, LTV, PMPM, and ROI vs VOI Reach and equity RE-AIM; population impact = reach × effectiveness