Reimagining Healthcare Print Management

Whether or not healthcare organizations realize it, print management and infrastructure is crucial to digital transformation, cybersecurity, and compliance. 

“There's one piece of infrastructure that all three rely upon, and nobody is even looking at that infrastructure today,” said Vasion chief technology officer Corey Ercanbrack at a recent 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. “It's your print infrastructure, the largest unstructured data pipeline in your environment.”

In other words, as organizations learn how to capture and incorporate data into their pipeline from the millions of printed documents they generate yearly, they can be better positioned to drive digital transformation, compliance, and cybersecurity.

However, in order to accomplish this, says Corey, healthcare organizations must face and correctly respond to three critical changes that have occurred in the last several months. “But there are opportunities in each one of these forces,” he adds, “if you are willing to reimagine your print infrastructure.”

On October 14, 2025, Microsoft officially discontinued support for the Windows 10 operating system, bringing on a host of potential negative consequences for organizations. 

As new system flaws were discovered, no security patches would be provided, making these systems easy pickings for malicious actors. Web browsers and other applications would become increasingly incompatible with the operating system. Driver updates would no longer be available for printers and other peripheral devices, bringing on more malfunctions. To top things off, organizations found still using the unsupported operating system would be in violation of GDPR and HIPAA and in danger of failing audits and incurring hefty fines.

Of course, organizations could and did extend their use of Microsoft support, but at an increasingly heavy price. Surprisingly, despite these mounting risks, a shocking number of healthcare organizations have been slow to move on. According to cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) and exposure management platform runZero, 42% of computers in healthcare networks were running on unsupported operating systems, most of which are Windows 10, as of November 2025.

“If you look at the healthcare industry as a whole, only a fraction of devices have actually been migrated off Windows 10 into Windows 11,” Corey explains. “And every time you do a migration from one operating system to another, guess what breaks? It's your print infrastructure.” 

This, he says, triggers a cascading effect. “If you're running Epic, Oracle, Meditech, or any other EHR system, typically in a migration, if your print breaks, your print breaks also for your EHR system,” says Corey. “It's the same infrastructure underneath, and your print server is next.”

However, in what seems like a no-win scenario for healthcare organizations, Corey sees a silver lining, an opportunity to take steps toward digital transformation, cybersecurity, and compliance. 

That opportunity, he says, is modernization.

“The opportunity is not to migrate your print servers, but to eliminate them, replacing them with a cloud-native SaaS solution that you manage centrally, that provides you with direct IP printing, that is vendor agnostic, that enables Zero Trust to modernize your print infrastructure.”

With print server maintenance, license costs, security, and help desk tickets costing an average of $3,400 per server per year, this kind of modernization can yield significant ROI. It also cuts out single points of failure, enables greater scalability, and allows enterprise-grade security controls for every device. 

To add onto the debacle that awaits with the sunsetting of Windows 10, Corey points out another doozy healthcare organizations have received in the last several months: the biggest HIPAA security rule overhaul in the last 25 years. 

“It's a 393-page proposed rule that audits every PHI access,” he says. “It requires you to do annual penetration testing and real-time monitoring. And OCR [i.e., The U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Civil Rights] is already auditing 50 organizations right now without the rule even being completely passed.”

With this rule, the security stakes go up at every step of a document workflow, including print infrastructure. 

Says Corey, “Every document sitting uncollected on an opened tray is a documentable security incident. Every print job without an audit trial is a compliance gap. Your CISO's probably asking, where is every document that left the hospital today—and who can answer that? Not very many people. You have no idea where those documents went.”

With HIPAA’s proposed rule looming large, this governance gap presents a major compliance liability. Healthcare organizations lack the ability to effectively and at scale control and track who printed what, when, from which system, and what happened to the document afterward. But why is this happening?

“Your print infrastructure is fragmented over six to 10 different vendors and solutions and systems,” Corey says plainly. He describes these as fragmented layers (e.g., EHR systems, VDI environments, end user printing, scan capabilities, form capabilities, mobile capture) each with their own system and vendor.  

Naturally, the key to solving this fragmentation is consolidation.

He continues, “Wouldn't it be nice if you could take all of that and consolidate it into a single intelligent print automation platform, taking print, output, capture, forms, signature, and powerful workflow capabilities, and one audit trail in one compliance posture. Imagine if you could start seeing all the data, all the documents flowing through that pipeline.”

Finally, the last several months of 2026 have brought a marked tightening of CMS documentation requirements. 

“New ICD-10 codes, updated EM guidelines, expanded quality reports, and more data per instance means more documents, more workflow, more data flowing through that legacy non updated print infrastructure,” says Corey. “That's a problem.”

Within the millions of documents created in the average healthcare organization (e.g., contracts, invoices, clinical records, compliance filings, and operational data) lies a vast treasure trove of data. Unfortunately, by virtue of its sheer scale and the analog nature of most print infrastructure, this data cannot be captured or harnessed by other systems to fuel digital transformation or an organization’s big AI project.

If an inability to scale to capture so much print-based data is the problem, then using a scalable technology like AI to automatically capture and unlock that data is the opportunity, says Corey.

“The opportunity here is to make every document that passes through your print layer intelligent,” he explains. “With what we call AI Print Driver, every document that flows through becomes a data event and gets captured. Data gets extracted and gets classified. It can notify, store, and then print or then be archived for compliance purposes. Every single piece of that document flowing through that pipeline is intelligent, is valuable, and is a piece of data that can be tracked.”

He continues, “When print infrastructure is architected to capture and act on that signal, a routine output action becomes an entry point for policy enforcement, workflow automation, document routing, and compliance logging.” 

The seismic shifts of the last several months are a blessing in disguise, incentivizing healthcare organizations to move their print operations toward modernization, consolidation, and automation. With this trifecta in effect, they can experience a modernized print environment where existential initiatives—cloud migration, Zero Trust, AI readiness, and regulatory compliance—are achievable.