Erratum to: Are cancer drugs less likely to be recommended for listing by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee in Australia?

Vol. 28, No. 6, 2010

The authors have reported two instances of miscoding in their analyses. The following corrections are as a result of their re-analysis.

Page 464: The final sentence of the second paragraph of the abstract should read: “Submissions that include a modelled economic evaluation and have a higher cost per QALY get approved less often than submissions without an economic modelling (p = 0.01).”

Page 468: Table II, numbers under the variable ‘Type of economic modelling’ should read:

Table II

Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) recommendations for meetings held between July 2005 and March 2008; univariate analysis of the effect of potentially confounding variables on the likelihood of PBAC approval

Page 469: The final sentence of the second paragraph of the Cancer versus Non-Cancer Drugs subsection should read: “Of the CUAs presented, a significantly higher proportion of non-cancer drug recommendations had a reported cost per QALY of ≤$A45 000 (29% vs 21%; p < 0.001), while a higher proportion of cancer drug recommendations had a reported cost per QALY of >$A75 000 (17% vs 3%; p < 0.001).”

Page 470: Table III, numbers under the variable ‘ Type of economic modelling’ should read:

Table III

Comparison of cancer vs non-cancer drugs for recommendations made at July 2005 to March 2008 Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) meetings

Page 471: Multivariable Analyses subsection

The first three sentences of the second paragraph should read: “After adjusting for the other variables, the estimated odds of approving a cancer drug were 0.63 (95% CI 0.30, 1.31) times the odds of approving a non-cancer drug, but this difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.2). In terms of economic modelling (p = 0.01), the odds of approving a submission were lower if the cost per QALY was >$A45 000. Compared with CMA or no modelling, the odds were 0.18 (95% CI 0.07, 0.49) for >$A45 000.”

The fifth and final sentences should read: “The odds of approving a submission with an estimated cost to the PBS of ≥$A10 million per year were 0.48 (95% CI 0.24, 0.94) times the odds of approving a submission with an estimated cost to the PBS of <$A10 million per year (p = 0.03). The model was a reasonable fit to the data (Hosmer and Lemeshow[¹⁵] goodness-of-fit test = 3.19, df = 7; p = 0.9).”

Page 472:Table IV should read:

Table IV

Multivariable logistic model results (n = 221)

[Chim L, Kelly PJ, Salkeld G, et al. Are cancer drugs less likely to be recommended for listing by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee in Australia? Pharmacoeconomics 2010; 28 (6): 463–75]