Same drugs, valued differently? Comparing comparators and methods used in reimbursement recommendations in Australia, Canada, and Korea

To investigate whether the value of the same drug is evaluated differently across jurisdictions, publicly available reimbursement recommendation data from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA, Korea) from January 2007 until July 2012 were compared with reimbursement recommendation data from the Pharmaceutical Benefit Advisory Committee (PBAC) of Australia, and the Common Drug Review (CDR) and the pan-Canadian Oncology Drug review (pCODR) of Canada. The most recent guidelines from the three agencies regarding the recommended methods of economic evaluation and comparator selection were also compared. During the observation period, 25 products were evaluated by all three countries. No significant differences in the comparator(s)’ selection or methods of economic evaluation were found, but the CDR was significantly less likely to positively recommend products compared with the other agencies (p=0.023). The agreement between agencies on selected comparator(s) was moderate to significant (kappa statistics=0.590–0.669), whereas the reimbursement decisions (kappa statistics=0.042–0.296) and the methods of economic evaluation (kappa statistics=0.138–0.525) showed slight to fair agreement. We illustrated that the divergence in reimbursement decisions across jurisdictions is less related to comparator selection or the level of clinical evidence considered and more related to country-specific issues.