A research letter about healthcare data breaches, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April, contained numerous errors, the authors and the publication admitted, though none apparently affected the study’s conclusions.
In JAMA’s correction notice, the venerable journal acknowledged five mistakes in the text and a dozen in a data table. The Retraction Watch blog (“Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process”) called it a “mega-correction,” because one result changed from statistically significant to “borderline significant” after the revision.
Lead author Dr. Vincent Liu, a Kaiser Permanente research scientist, told Retraction Watch that JAMA inadvertently published the table with outdated information. “Once we became aware that the older version was published, we corrected the table with the editorial staff. The overall study findings remained consistent,” Liu reportedly told the watchdog blog.
The research letter was a review of 949 breaches of protected health information, as defined by HIPAA, in the U.S. between 2010 and 2013. The breaches affected the records of 29 million patients, not the 29.1 million originally mentioned in the April publication.
It’s events like this that keep many of us in journalism hopeful that publishers will stop cutting editing jobs.
Click here to view an archived copy of the erroneous version.
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