Since the manuscript’s publication, the authors have been working on other, unrelated studies using the same database. The authors found results in these new, unrelated studies to be implausible and so undertook an intensive, several weeks-long investigation to determine whether the common database was in some way incorrectly assembled or was missing data. They found that a programmer in the group had failed to load 8 files of prescription and claims data into the dataset. This mistake occurred despite quality checks and resulted in the under-reporting of prescription drug use in the database.
The authors have now re-run all analyses for this study. In particular, because cohort entry in the Part D coverage gap study depends on prescription drug use, they now identify a larger number of patients and a larger number of drugs that can be studied. As a result, these analyses differ from those originally presented. The manuscript’s main message remains the same.
Citation:The PLOS Medicine Staff (2014) Correction: Changes in Drug Utilization during a Gap in Insurance Coverage: An Examination of the Medicare Part D Coverage Gap. PLoS Med 11(8): e1001716. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001716
Published: August 13, 2014
Copyright: © 2014 The PLOS Medicine Staff. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
