30 August 2018 - How will this new objective be assessed?

Medicines Australia has signed a strategic agreement with the Australian Government. In return for some pricing concessions, the Government has agreed to reduce the period from PBAC recommendation to PBS listing by two months. Like other recent policy/process initiatives to improve timely access to new medicines, the Department will probably not establish an infrastructure to determine if this new objective will have any material effect on access timelines.  The Department has never set out to determine if the introduction of the TGA-PBAC parallel process has actually improved access timelines. Some might argue that it has had no effect or even made things worse.

In order to reduce the period from PBAC recommendation to PBS listing by two months, one needs to have a baseline.  Such a baseline does not exist. More on that shortly. Presumably the objective is to reduce a summary estimate by two months. Discrete values vary considerably so it is unclear whether the summary values should be a mean or a median.

The listing of new medicines on the PBS is on-going (16 new medicines have been listed on the PBS in the first 8 months of this year), so any analysis will need to be dynamic.

To initiate the discussion, MAESTrO has determined the time from PBAC recommendation to PBS listing for the 16 new listings for 2018.  On Monday, MAESTrO Daily will publish the mean and median values for all new medicines listed on the PBS up to and including 1 September 2018.  The final values for 2018 may well form the baseline for future thorough analysis of this new process objective.