"Health economics is concerned with issues related to efficiency, effectiveness, value, and behavior in the production and consumption of health and healthcare."
Overview of the discipline of Health Economics, including its major concerns, theories, concepts, and methods.
Health systems and healthcare financing: Covers the structure, organization, and financing mechanisms of healthcare systems, including public and private sources, healthcare costs and their impact on the economy, and the role of insurance.
Economic evaluation techniques: Introduces methods for assessing the economic value of healthcare interventions, including cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and cost-utility analysis.
Health technology assessment (HTA): Examines the process of evaluating clinical and cost effectiveness of new medical technologies, including drugs, devices, and procedures.
Demand for healthcare: Explains the factors that influence individual demand for healthcare services, including patients' preferences, income, access, and health status.
Supply of healthcare: Describes the factors determining the supply of healthcare services, including physician and hospital behavior, capacity constraints, medical innovation, and competition.
Health inequality and equity: Explores how health inequality arises and operate, and covers policies and strategies addressing health inequality by considering equity principles.
Pharmacoeconomics: Examines the economic evaluation of pharmaceuticals, including the assessment of drug cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses.
Behavioral economics: Explores the relationship between human behavior and decision-making while focusing on how individuals make health-related decisions in response to changing incentives and experiences.
Health insurance and managed care: Deals with different types of insurance coverage, levels of benefit, cost-sharing arrangements, provider incentives, enrollment, and decision-making.
Health policy and reforms: Entails analysis of existing health policy and strategy orientation towards developing or revising health policies to reduce costs, increase access to affordable care and establish effective systems.
Health workforce: Explores the role of human capital in the delivery of health care with specified focus on the efficiency of recruitment, deployment, retention and job satisfaction.
Socioeconomic determinants of health: Investigates the impact of socioeconomic status, income inequality, poverty, education, culture, on health and healthcare-seeking behaviour.
Cost-effectiveness analysis: Evaluates the value of interventions in terms of cost per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY), commonly utilized to identify if an intervention is cost-effective or not.
Public health economics: Investigates the distribution of health care resources, and studies theoretical frameworks of health systems and policy that focuses on public health and disease prevention.
International Health Economics: Discusses health issues around the world with specific focus on the issues, whether universal health care systems can be developed across countries and attempts on addressing it.
Basic Introduction: This type of introduction provides an overview of health economics, including its definition, relevance, and scope, and introduces key concepts and methods.
Historical Introduction: This type of introduction traces the roots of health economics to the early 20th century and the development of insurance programs and public health policies. It highlights key milestones and contributors to the field.
Applied Introduction: This type of introduction focuses on real-world health economics problems, such as healthcare financing, healthcare delivery, and healthcare quality, and introduces practical solutions.
Comparative Introduction: This type of introduction compares different healthcare systems and policies across different countries, highlighting similarities, differences, and implications for health outcomes and costs.
Mathematical Introduction: This type of introduction uses mathematical models and equations to explain health economics concepts and methods, including supply and demand, elasticity, cost-benefit analysis, and game theory.
Behavioral Introduction: This type of introduction examines the role of human behavior in health economics, including decision-making under uncertainty, information asymmetry, and moral hazard.
Policy Introduction: This type of introduction focuses on health policy and the role of health economics in informing policy decisions, including analysis of trade-offs between efficiency and equity considerations.
Pharmaceutical Introduction: This type of introduction focuses on the economics of pharmaceuticals, including drug pricing, cost-effectiveness analysis, and the interaction between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare systems.
Environmental Introduction: This type of introduction explores the economics of environmental factors on health and healthcare costs, including air pollution, climate change, and water contamination.
Ethical Introduction: This type of introduction examines ethical issues in health economics, such as rationing and allocation of resources, informed consent, and the role of values in decision-making.
"Health economics helps in determining how to improve health outcomes and lifestyle patterns through interactions between individuals, healthcare providers, and clinical settings."
"Health economists study health-affecting behaviors such as smoking, diabetes, and obesity."
"One of the biggest difficulties regarding healthcare economics is that it does not follow normal rules for economics."
"Price and Quality are often hidden by the third-party payer system of insurance companies and employers."
"QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years) is one of the most commonly used measurements for treatments, but it is very difficult to measure and relies upon assumptions that are often unreasonable."
"In healthcare, the third-party agent is the patient's health insurer, who is financially responsible for the healthcare goods and services consumed by the insured patient."
"A seminal 1963 article by Kenneth Arrow is often credited with giving rise to health economics as a discipline."
"Factors that distinguish health economics from other areas include extensive government intervention, intractable uncertainty in several dimensions, asymmetric information, barriers to entry, externality, and the presence of a third-party agent."
"Health economists evaluate multiple types of financial information: costs, charges, and expenditures."
"Uncertainty is intrinsic to health, both in patient outcomes and financial concerns."
"The knowledge gap that exists between a physician and a patient creates a situation of distinct advantage for the physician, which is called asymmetric information."
"Externalities arise frequently when considering health and health care, notably in the context of the health impacts as with infectious disease or opioid abuse."
"Making an effort to avoid catching the common cold affects people other than the decision maker."
"Finding sustainable, humane, and effective solutions to the opioid epidemic."
"Health economics helps in determining how to improve health outcomes and lifestyle patterns through interactions between individuals, healthcare providers, and clinical settings."
"Health economists study health-affecting behaviors such as smoking, diabetes, and obesity."
"Price and Quality are often hidden by the third-party payer system of insurance companies and employers."
"Factors that distinguish health economics from other areas include extensive government intervention."
"Factors that distinguish health economics from other areas include extensive government intervention, intractable uncertainty in several dimensions, asymmetric information, barriers to entry, externality, and the presence of a third-party agent."