Great story on MacCopy the other day that got me thinking. What are the true benefits of managed print services (MPS) for healthcare?
MacCopy suggested three areas in healthcare where MPS is important: 1) protecting print privacy, 2) increasing print security, and 3) providing print service, support, and monitoring. All are compelling points.
The more time I spend with hospitals and healthcare professionals, the more opportunities I see for print providers to offer a unique, timesaving, stress-reducing service that supports these vital institutions.
I think I can sum up some MPS best practices for healthcare using PaperCut in five considerations.
1. Print visibility
Ensure you have complete visibility into who’s printing what and when to maintain HIPAA compliance. There are three key features built into PaperCut MF to note here: watermarking and digital signatures, audit logs, and print job logs.
2. Print control
Control who can print what. The MacCopy article already touched on this, but PaperCut’s Secure Print Release feature is an elegant way to make sure you don’t have patient information sitting in a printer tray. Authentication at the device is the critical step here, to ensure the system knows the correct user is genuinely at the device and to release only the documents a user has access to. PaperCut’s Secure Print Release does exactly this.
3. Easy printing
Make printers easy for people to find. Let’s talk about Find Me printing, which is a great complimenting feature to Secure Print Release. These two features together look like this:
- The user hit print from whatever workstation they are at. This adds their print job to a single site-wide global queue
- The user then walks up to the nearest applicable printer, swipes a badge, and locates their job,
- Hits print to “release” it at that printer
4. Secure scanning
Admin control of secure scanning to specific destinations. PaperCut MF has an Admin web interface to set up the main features like scan actions, OCR settings, default scan settings, cloud destination options, and shared folder settings. After that, when a user logs into a device they’ll see only the scan actions that you’ve configured for them.
We’ve also brought this same flexibility to Scan to Fax. A new scan action in PaperCut MF allows users to send a scanned document as a fax through their preferred fax provider. With two service options (SMTP or API), administrators can now control who can send what where while still delivering a pleasant and seamless experience to end-users.
5. Simplified print queue deployment
Simplify and streamline print drivers and queues. Print Deploy automates the time-consuming, frustrating tasks of setting up print queues and deploying print drivers. It’s perfect if you have multiple locations (e.g. clinics, departments, partners) with few IT resources on-site, have clinical support care moving between locations, needing access to printers on-demand, or have a mixed computer environment and want an easy way to enable printing on all of them (no matter the operating system or end-user permission level). It enables users to move between locations, for example, hospitals, offices, or clinics, without them setting anything up. The location’s printers are dynamically downloaded onto their computers.
There you go, five ways a print partner offering managed print services can improve your print environment using PaperCut!
Want to chat about how PaperCut can improve printing in healthcare?
