How to Optimize Print Management in EMR and EHR Environments

Let’s face it. There’s no perfect way to get a job done. While Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software like Epic, MEDITECH, and Oracle Health EHR are undoubtedly valuable tools for accessing and maintaining medical records, they don’t make print management a walk in the park. Instead, they often turn print management into a nightmare scenario by placing rigorous demands on a print environment’s hardware and workflow. 

The unification of a rock-solid print management solution and EMR software may have seemed unlikely before; however, PrinterLogic makes it a reality by providing an integrated next-generation EMR print management solution that’s uniquely suited to solving the fundamental printing problems with EMR systems.

Let’s examine three fundamental issues of EMR and EHR print architecture and how PrinterLogic solves them. 

It’s tough to manage a printer fleet that is spread across multiple locations. This is one of the significant issues that IT professionals face in a fragmented and complex print environment that depends on print servers. Dispersed printing environments make fundamental practices like adding a printer to the network a chore. The prime reasons are that the IT departments have to make sure the printer is compatible with every type of environment and come up with GPO deployment rules.

Not only must the IT department scramble to find solutions to printer problems, but employees are also left scrambling to find the right printer to print to. In a dispersed print environment, convenience is hard to come by, and end users feel powerless. Plus, they constantly rely on the IT helpdesk to fix issues that could be solved with a user-friendly interface and more user empowerment. 

Solution

Eliminating your print servers makes consolidating and simplifying print management possible. Using PrinterLogic’s web-based management portal allows you to administer your entire print environment—no matter how distributed—from a single pane of glass. Any changes you make can be instantly synchronized across any number of EPSs throughout your organization. That saves time and reduces the likelihood of mistakes, as OhioHealth discovered when simplifying its Epic printing environment by deploying PrinterLogic’s print management software.

It takes a ton of effort to increase transparency in a conventional healthcare printing environment because most don’t have the monitoring, auditing, and reporting features that are needed to keep up. This is evident in a typical Epic printing environment. Each Epic print server (EPS) requires manual intervention when adding, changing, or removing printers. This means that a single change for, say, one model of printer has to be repeated for every single EPS–and commonly for every single instance of that printer model on that EPS. 

Not only is that style of management incredibly tedious, but it is also short-sighted. It creates disparate systems between locations, teams, and processes, potentially causing duplicative print queue management. It’s a painfully inefficient and potentially problematic approach to EMR print management. 

Solution

Output Automation from PrinterLogic allows you to view and manage all front- and back-end print activity across your entire organization from a single interface. 

With strengthened visibility, admins are able to gather and assess data quickly, giving insight into:

• Which printers are seeing the most traffic

• When certain print jobs were carried out

• Which users account for the most print jobs in a given department

• Who printed “classified” documents
  

These features show the holes in your print environment, allowing you to utilize Rules & Routing and better manage the security of your print environment. Most importantly, Output Automation sets you up for future success by providing the full scope of your print environment, leading you to make more informed decisions tailored to your organization’s specific needs and growth. Keep reading for more on how to improve clinical printing with Output Automation and optimize print management in EMR and EHR environments.

Keeping client information confidential seems like a simple task, but it continues to be a problem even with the technological advances in print management. Maintaining the privacy of sensitive client information is especially difficult in distributed healthcare environments since employees are constantly rotating shifts or moving from department to department. 

In dynamic environments like this, client information gets lost easily through accidentally being picked up over other print jobs or remains a vulnerable piece of paper in a random printer tray waiting to be picked up by anyone around. It’s hard to stay HIPAA compliant in an environment where you can’t manage who sees your clients’ information. 

Solution

PrinterLogic gives end users the power to hold their print jobs in their workstations through Secure Release Printing. Not only does it keep sensitive data in the hands of employees who need it, but it also greatly minimizes cost, keeps your company HIPAA compliant, and requires minimal effort by employees to execute a print job. 

Using PrinterLogic’s Secure Release Printing feature, you simply click “Print” but instead of the job being sent directly to the printer, it is held at your workstation. Once you are ready to print, simply walk over to the nearest printer and authorize the print job by using a badge/card reader, a PIN, or our smartphone app (iOS and Android). For an extra layer of security, badge+PIN or user ID+PIN options are also available. Learn additional ways to protect PHI with cloud-native printing. 

PrinterLogic has simplified healthcare printing environments and, at the same time, eliminated companies’ costs of purchase, operation, and maintenance—not to mention their single points of failure. Here are some of the companies that have benefited from PrinterLogic’s EMR print management solution:

• Guthrie: PrinterLogic simplified Guthrie’s Epic print environment by enabling mobile employees to print from any office and reducing the time and cost of print-related helpdesk calls.

• Saber Healthcare Group: PrinterLogic’s centralized Admin Console helped take pressure off a distraught IT team that needed simplified, around-the-clock print capabilities for a growing business. 

• UW Health: PrinterLogic helped stamp out their WAN chokepoints by leveraging direct IP printing while maintaining centralized management. This greatly increased their overall print speeds and helped avoid headaches associated with high network traffic. 

• OhioHealth: To keep their goals of a 10-fold expansion to their Epic print environment within reach, PrinterLogic offered OhioHealth a solution for streamlining print server and printer configurations. With one simple click, they can now update all printers and servers automatically. 

• Princeton Community Hospital: Utilizing a MEDITECH print environment, Princeton Community Hospital realized that MEDITECH’s inability to work well in heterogeneous environments was causing them too much inconvenience. After installing PrinterLogic, they gained unprecedented print availability and uptime, and user-initiated printer installations. 

Along with the ability to integrate with Epic and MEDITECH, PrinterLogic has added Oracle Health EHR to its list of compatible EMR software.