How to Improve Printing Strategies for Medical Practices

From an IT standpoint, healthcare environments can be more complex than many other industries. Medical staff often work in shifts, putting in long and irregular hours. Frontline medical professionals like doctors and nurses also tend to be highly mobile.

That can make it hard for IT to ensure that they always have quick and seamless access to the resources they need.

But there’s at least one additional IT challenge that the healthcare industry grapples with, and that’s secure medical printing. Electronic medical (or health) records, or EMR/EHR for short, have to be treated with the utmost confidentiality—especially when they make the leap from digital to paper. If a healthcare organization is found to violate the strict regulations governing protected health information (PHI), it can face steep fines or severe penalties.

As healthcare companies like Navicent Health can tell you, all of that makes routine print management incredibly difficult.

PrinterLogic has helped Navicent Health and many other organizations in the healthcare industry overcome those issues. Our serverless printing infrastructure provided the complete solution to their ongoing problems with secure medical printing as well as day-to-day print management. It’s enabled them to improve their printing strategies and deliver better patient care.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the benefits that PrinterLogic’s serverless printing offers medical practices and other healthcare organizations.

• Protecting patient privacy: PrinterLogic brings secure release printing functionality to any network printer, even legacy devices. Using this feature, medical staff and admin staff can safeguard PHI by authenticating at the printer before their sensitive documents are printed. That’s cost-effective, convenient and, above all, secure.

• Increasing staff mobility: It’s easy to streamline clinical workflows through PrinterLogic’s mobile printing capabilities. No matter where they happen to be, medical professionals can print natively to authorized printers from their iOS or Android smartphones and tablets. BYOD and guest users are supported too.

• Reducing the burden on the helpdesk: Serverless printing isn’t only more secure than traditional print-server-based architectures. It’s also more reliable. PrinterLogic leverages direct IP to route print jobs straight to printers, increasing speed as well as simplicity. The result is that end users spend far less time on the phone with the helpdesk.

• Cutting IT costs: Eliminating print servers is the ideal way to shrink your print infrastructure—and PrinterLogic is the way to achieve that without sacrificing functionality. Serverless printing removes print servers’ single points of failure and their expensive upkeep. At the same time, PrinterLogic introduces more flexibility and scalability.

• Empowering end users: One of the biggest print management headaches is printer installation. PrinterLogic’s self-service printer installation portal puts that power safely in the hands of end users. Medical staff can then identify and install nearby printers with a single click.

• Identifying print-related expenditures: Advanced reporting is an easy way to get a fix on the finer points of your print environment. With it, you can put a dollar amount to individual or departmental usage of consumables like toner and paper. It even integrates with your existing SNMP and BI tools.

• Monitoring and auditing print activity: Keeping a watchful eye on print jobs and printer access is a big part of any secure medical printing strategy. PrinterLogic allows admins to view print activity right down to the printer and user level to ensure compliance with PHI requirements.

Healthcare organizations often have dedicated software solutions in place for their EMR/EHR printing. MEDITECH is one of them, and it requires print servers for its secure medical printing. Yet PrinterLogic is versatile enough to simplify print management in MEDITECH environments, not to mention environments that use Citrix, Cerner and other solutions that can add layers of complexity to printing.

Edgewood Healthcare was no exception. Their environment makes use of VPN connections to 60 distributed locations. On top of that, they use web-based ResiDex software for their EMR printing. By migrating to serverless printing through PrinterLogic, Edgewood eliminated close to 30 print servers, centralized direct IP printer deployments and reduced the number of print-related support tickets by around 95%. You can read the case study here.