Efficacy is the capacity to produce a desired size of an effect under ideal or optimal conditions. It is these conditions that distinguish efficacy from the related concept of effectiveness, which relates to change under real-life conditions.

Healthcare

In a healthcare context, efficacy indicates the capacity for beneficial change (or therapeutic effect) of a given intervention (e.g. a medicine, medical device, surgical procedure, or a public health intervention).

If efficacy is established, an intervention is likely to be at least as good as other available interventions, to which it will have been compared. Comparisons of this type are typically made in 'explanatory' randomized controlled trials, whereas 'pragmatic' trials are used to establish the effectiveness of an intervention.

The concept of 'self-efficacy' is an important one in the self-management of chronic diseases because doctors and patients often do not follow best practice in using a treatment. For instance, a patient using combined oral contraceptive pills to prevent pregnancy may sometimes forget to take a pill at the prescribed time; thus, while the perfect-use failure rate for this form of contraception in the first year of use is just 0.3%, the typical-use failure rate is 8%.1

Pharmacology

The term is often used to classify the activity of a drug upon binding to its receptor.

• agonist: affinity and maximum efficacy
• antagonist : affinity without efficacy
• partial agonist: affinity and partial efficacy

Lighting

Main: Luminous efficacy In lighting design, "efficacy" refers to the amount of light (luminous flux) produced by a lamp (a light bulb or other light source), usually measured in lumens, as a ratio of the amount of energy consumed to produce it, usually measured in watts. This is not to be confused with efficiency which is always a dimensionless ratio of output divided by input which for lighting relates to the watts of visible energy as a ratio of the energy consumed in watts. The visible energy can be approximated by the area under the Planck curve between 300 nm and 700 nm for a blackbody at the temperature of the filament as a ratio of the total energy under the blackbody curve. Efficacy values for light from a heat source are typically less than two percent.

Difference amplifiers

The efficacy of a differential amplifier is measured by the degree of its rejection of common-mode signals in preference to differential signals. Referred to as common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR); typically specified in decibels.

See also

• Placebo (origins of technical term)
• Vaccine efficacy
• Efficiency
• Figure of merit
• Self-efficacy
• Effectiveness