"Is Cybermedicine Killing You?" - A Response From the Authors of the Cochrane Review

We wish to respond to the paper by Rada [1] and accompanying editorial by Eysenbach and Kummervold [2] in JMIR regarding our Cochrane systematic review on interactive health communication applications (IHCAs) for chronic disease. This systematic review was published in October 2004 in Issue 4 of The Cochrane Library, and we were notified of potential errors in the direction of change for clinical outcomes about 10 days after publication. We immediately reviewed our work and confirmed that errors had been made. We decided that our main responsibility was to limit the harm caused by these errors, by firstly, ensuring that all relevant stakeholders were informed as quickly as possible, and secondly, working toward correcting the errors in a transparent open fashion. Within 48 hours of the first notification, we had informed (a) the editors of the Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group, (b) the funders of the work, and (c) the University College London (UCL) press office. For technical reasons, it was not possible to immediately withdraw the review from The Cochrane Library website, so an alert was posted on the review, warning readers that there were errors in the direction of change for some of the behavioral and clinical outcomes and apologizing for the mistake. No one could access the review without seeing this alert. The review was withdrawn in Issue 1 of The Cochrane Library in 2005. We also made every effort to contact journalists who we knew to be writing articles about the original publication, but which had not yet been published. Since then we have continued to work closely with the editorial team of the Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group to revise the review. We are grateful for all the help and support we have received in this process.