• RIAA Unfairly Maligned? Give Me a Break. - More on the RIAA and attempts to manage disruption, from Mashable.
• Characteristics of Recipients of Free Prescription Drug Samples: A Nationally Representative Analysis — Cutrona et al., 10.2105/AJPH.2007.114249 — American Journal of Public Health - Study demonstrating that free drug samples are not a safety net. In my practice career I have never used samples (and I’ve never prescribed celecoxib or rofecoxib, either).
• Health Affairs — eLetters for Walker et al., 0 (2005) 5101 - Comment on interoperable HIT being a net gain/loss for physicians, by Peter Basch, MD, of Medstar Health. I agree that we have to be cautious of theorized benefit in this case.
• Health Affairs — eLetters for Adler-Milstein et al., 0 (2007) 271601 - Comment from Peter Basch, MD, about the sequencing and business case for RHIOs not being ready yet.
• Dupont Circle Citizens Association - Learning more about my community. There has been an uptick in crime, unfortunately.

Today’s links are representative of the fact that we aren’t doing observations right now. Instead, we are preparing our first 90 day interim report for our partners. This means looking back on the last 90 days, and putting together our impressions at the interface between patient and health system, along with relevant background and policy information. We’ll post that here, of course.

PCHIT links for December 24th through December 26th:

• U.S. healthcare payers to limit IT investments in 2008 -
• ACGroup, Inc. Whitepapers - Nice overviews of the EHR market and physician practices
• PHRs: From Evolution To Revolution by Liz Boehm - Forrester Research - Interesting commentary on health plans, PHRs, and adoption. Are health plans ready?