Few people outside of healthcare IT truly get how critical printing is to clinical workflows. From medication labels and wristbands to discharge instructions and lab reports, printing is the secret, invisible force behind nearly every patient interaction. And like most secret, invisible forces, we only really appreciate it when it stops working.
But as hospitals have grown more complex, managing the sheer volume of medical printing has turned into an operational quagmire. And at the heart of the issue? The humble printer driver. AKA the nemesis of every overworked healthcare print admin. Fortunately, new approaches like driverless printing offer a cleaner path forward.
The growing burden of unique drivers
The reality is that most healthcare organizations rely on a patchwork of hundreds, maybe thousands, of different printers spread across departments, floors and clinics. And each device often requires its own driver to work properly with various applications.
That means IT teams have to maintain an ever-expanding library of drivers, manually testing and deploying them to user workstations and servers. Every. Single. Time.
It also means that every update, hardware refresh or software change can create cascading, uncontrollable compatibility headaches, tying up resources and (ultimately) increasing the likelihood of failure. Not ideal, right?
Conflicts with EHR systems
To add to the drama, enterprise electronic health record (EHR) platforms like Epic and Meditech have their own complex requirements for print output . Printer drivers that work fine for standard office documents often struggle with EHR-generated materials.
For example, prescription templates, barcode labels and patient wristbands must print with perfect formatting. For the patient’s benefit, but also for strict organizational compliance.
Driver conflicts can frequently result in truncated labels or garbled text: mistakes that can endanger patients and leave your organization open to litigation, or regulatory penalties. Fixing these issues can take hours, or even days, disrupting workflows and frustrating clinicians.
Delayed care from print failures
In critical areas like emergency departments or operating rooms, any delay can ultimately impact patient outcomes. When a print driver fails, staff may have to track down an available printer elsewhere, re-enter data, or wait for IT support to restore service. These little interruptions add up to real delays in care delivery.
Imagine a trauma team pausing to troubleshoot why a consent form won’t print; it’s an unacceptable situation in a high-stakes environment. And one that can be easily prevented.
The hidden cost to lean IT teams
Healthcare IT teams (like IT teams everywhere) are usually stretched thin, balancing cybersecurity, infrastructure upgrades and regulatory compliance with limited budgets.
Supporting printer drivers across hundreds of devices and locations creates a hidden drain on time and resources. This drain doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, but it’s real, and it’s there .
Ask any technician and they’ll tell you they can spend countless hours updating drivers, resolving conflicts, and answering help desk tickets related to printing problems. That’s time that could be redirected toward higher-value stuff, but the constant churn of driver issues keeps teams locked in reactive mode.
No uniformity across departments
One of the biggest contributors to driver-related chaos is the lack of consistent printer naming and configuration standards across an organization. Sound familiar?
Departments may create their own naming conventions: “ER_HP4050” in one area, for example, “HP_LASER_01” in another, without any centralized oversight. When a driver needs updating or a device is replaced, this inconsistency creates confusion, increasing the risk of misconfigurations that interrupt clinical workflows.
The perils of outdated print servers
Many hospitals still rely on traditional print servers to distribute drivers and manage queues. And while this architecture worked in the past, it now represents what’s known in the business as a ‘single point of failure’.
That means, if a print server goes down, every connected device gets impacted, sometimes across multiple facilities. In medical environments where uptime is essential, these outages can have severe consequences for patients and clinicians.
Relying on old servers and fragile infrastructure only compounds the problem. What we want instead is what’s known as High Availability (HA).
Unsecured and misrouted prints in hybrid care
With more healthcare delivery occurring outside hospital walls – think stuff like telehealth consults, remote clinics, and hybrid care models – print security is under new pressure. Some systems can cope with this pressure. Others can’t.
When you introduce hybrid care to the mix, misrouted documents or unsecured queues can quickly expose protected health information. Drivers that lack robust security controls or fail to integrate with modern authentication systems increase the risk of data breaches and HIPAA violations.
For more printing tips in hybrid environments, check out this article .
Vendor lock-in and siloed systems
We’ve covered the dreaded vendor lock-in before . See, many printer manufacturers use proprietary drivers that don’t play well with other vendors’ hardware. This creates siloed environments where each department becomes tied to specific devices, limiting flexibility and complicating centralized management.
So when organizations want to standardize on a single print management platform or pursue centralized printing, vendor-specific drivers often stand in the way. It’s one reason we always recommend a vendor-neutral approach to print management.
How driverless printing can help
Driverless printing – also known as universal or direct IP printing – offers a promising alternative to the traditional model. Especially for healthcare organizations.
With driverless solutions, print jobs are rendered in a standardized format (like PDF) on the user’s device, then sent directly to the printer without relying on a unique driver. This approach greatly simplifies print management, reducing help desk calls and improving uptime.
For clinicians, it means fewer disruptions and faster access to critical documents. For IT, it means a lighter support burden and more time to focus on strategic priorities. Imagine that: no more print drivers. It’s the dream!
Toward a centralized, simplified print future
To get ahead of this print driver nightmare, hospitals are increasingly adopting centralized print management platforms. Like PaperCut. These solutions provide a single pane of glass for managing all your print activity, standardizing naming conventions and automating updates. All from the one place.
Centralized printing architectures can eliminate outdated print servers, enforce uniform policies and streamline the deployment of driverless printing. The result? Fewer points of failure, tighter security and more predictable performance.
At the end of the day, print drivers may seem like a minor technical detail, but in healthcare, they can make or break patient care.
