PrinterLogic Simplifies Print Management for Healthcare Organizations That Use MEDITECH EMR Systems

MEDITECH has a large and devoted customer base of healthcare providers, thanks to the company’s industry-leading electronic medical records (EMR) solutions. However, as many IT professionals will tell you, it can be challenging to ensure smooth, reliable EMR printing in certain MEDITECH environments.

That’s partly because EMR printing in general is tightly regulated. As such, it involves a lot of additional security and auditing considerations. It’s also because EMR printing with MEDITECH relies on the use of the company’s proprietary print-server technology. Print servers are essential to the way the software sends print jobs and enforces secure printing.

Which means print servers can’t be eliminated in MEDITECH environments. But the good news is that they can be managed more efficiently with PrinterLogic. That goes for healthcare organizations’ in-house IT departments as well as providers of managed print services.

First, let’s look at the main challenge in EMR printing when using MEDITECH solutions.

One of the biggest hurdles in any print environment, healthcare or otherwise, is ensuring consistency across the entire organization. Without a print infrastructure that’s designed for ease of administration and single-portal manageability, that can be hard to do.

In MEDITECH scenarios, ensuring consistency becomes even more difficult. Why? Well, MEDITECH recommends having redundant servers in place for the sake of high availability. When changes such as software updates or printer installations are made, those changes have to be replicated across all of the primary print servers as well as their backups.

That creates a management headache for admins. But it’s an absolute migraine for managed print services providers, who can sometimes be responsible for multiple MEDITECH customers. One tiny update could mean having to check into every single print server across several MEDITECH print environments.

Along with being incredibly tedious, this lack of automation and unified oversight increases the risk of human error.

PrinterLogic lets healthcare end users re-focus on patient care

The complexity of print management with MEDITECH EMR solutions often plays out in day-to-day printing. If a change doesn’t get carried out on a particular print server, for example, then EMR printing will obviously be affected for end users. And in healthcare, your end users are going to be medical professionals and staff whose goal is patient care above all else.

PrinterLogic’s intuitive, centralized management consolidates the entire MEDITECH print environment under one admin console. That allows IT staff and managed print services providers to make changes once and have them populate across all print servers. They can also monitor and manage print queues from a single pane of glass.

For end users, that simplicity of printer and driver management translates to more reliable EMR printing. Healthcare staff and medical professionals can instead focus on delivering top-notch care to their patients instead of struggling with printers.

By the same token, PrinterLogic also contributes to more secure printing. Admins and managed print services providers are able to keep track of print activity across the environment far more easily. And end users can be more confident that their confidential print jobs will go to the correct destination printers.

Proven, real-world results

Princeton Community Hospital in West Virginia operates a multi-site MEDITECH environment with a printer fleet of around 700 devices. Their IT department turned to PrinterLogic in the hopes of fixing a recurring—and inexplicable—glitch that would regularly knock all their background MEDITECH print servers offline. They could only be restored through a manual reboot.

Not only did the hospital’s IT staff solve their mysterious server issues, they also achieved simplified printer installation through PrinterLogic. Now when an end user needs a new printer, the helpdesk just emails a link that takes care of everything. PrinterLogic improved driver management as well. Incorrect driver assignments are a thing of the past. Read the case study here.

If you want to restore sanity, predictability and consistency to EMR printing with MEDITECH too, why not take PrinterLogic for a test drive? Sign up today for a free 30-day trial of our PrinterLogic Web Stack solution.