We recommend that you dictate a 2-3-sentence summary and place it into your progress notes. Alternatively, you could scan in the letters using optical character recognition or you can store the letters as scanned images. This latter option has some problems because the data is not easily searchable and will result in a very large database. For example, a 5,000 patient ComChart file, with no scanned letters is about 350 MB whereas the same 5,000 patient file, in which all incoming letters are scanned is estimated to be about 2,600 MB (2.6 GB). As a CD-ROM currently holds only 650 MB, the latter option may be difficult to backup and slow the operation of a database. As backing-up is essential, and should be done frequently on a defined schedule (at least twice daily), it should be as easy to do as is possible. It is our experience that the 2-3 sentence summary option is the most cost effective and easiest to implement.