Comparing the trends of MBS telepsychiatry and consultant physician telehealth services from 2017 to 2022: A retrospective study—CORRIGENDUM

Dear Editor,
The authors regret to inform the journal readers that the original published paper1 contained an error concerning the counts of face-to-face services. In the Methods section, we stated that “To avoid double counting, the numbers of services under the co-claim items for telehealth (Items 112, 288, and 294) were deducted from the face-to-face service total numbers (See Supplemental Material: Appendix).” As explained in the Appendix, we made the adjustments based on the example of another paper.2 However, we have received clarification from the data provider, Services Australia, that the processed Medicare claims data only contain the telehealth item records without the corresponding face-to-face items. The Supplemental Material: Appendix, which explains adjustments of consultant physician and psychiatric face-to-face service counts, is unnecessary and removed. The corrected number of services is 86,874,183 for MBS consultant physician items and 11,867,338 for psychiatrist items. The corrected increase from the pre-expansion period to the expansion period in consultant physician telehealth services is from 0.6% to 20.0%. It is from 3.7% to 42.1% for telepsychiatry services. The numbers for total and face-to-face consultations in Supplemental Table 2 are revised. The changes do not alter the trends illustrated in the figures, inferences, and conclusions in the original paper.