To the Editor:

What you said in your article “Why It's Time to Purchase an Electronic Health Record System” [November/December 2004, page 43] is all true — until a virus comes in and attacks the Microsoft operating system Windows 2000, destroying your data. This happened in our practice, and then we found out that the backup system our computer consultant said was flawless had not been working for the past three months. Most recently, the power supply blew in our server and brought the office to a grinding halt for a week.

Now we are returning to paper scheduling and outsourcing our billing. The fragility of the computer systems and their expense, particularly in a poor reimbursement area like California, make the EHR just a dream at the moment.