Healthy print management

A quick guide to healthy print management

Your priority should be the health of your patients, not your printers

Healthcare workers are always-on, ready to save lives in any situation kind of people. Working under intense conditions, they have to be able to adapt quickly to change – because the health and wellbeing of their patients is at stake.

As a tech specialist, you need your infrastructure to allow doctors and nurses to focus on improving patient outcomes and experience without any obstacles or delays. Printing, scanning, and faxing should get the least attention in your technology stack because it should just work.

When it comes to patient care, technology can be a healthcare professional’s greatest support system but only if it offers the flexibility, security, and accessibility they need. Otherwise it just gets in the way.

In the healthcare industry, paper-based workflows and physical documents still rule. A large healthcare organization may have thousands of multifunction printers (MFPs) and copiers spread across multiple floors, buildings, cities, and even countries.

Doctors and nurses often need to move between locations - like different clinics, offices, specialist care centers, and campuses – making it challenging to quickly find the right printer. They might also be working on their own devices - including ThinOS Terminals, Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, mobiles or tablets.

For IT teams, installing new printers and managing print queues can be complex and time consuming. The increased use of cloud platforms and integrations poses additional cybersecurity challenges but, with limited visibility into the print environment, it’s difficult to monitor and protect against critically sensitive patient data falling into the wrong hands, either maliciously or by accident.

Then there are the costs and compatibility issues associated with integrating legacy systems like rostering, finance, inventory management, and ERP, with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) applications and virtual solutions.

The regulatory environment of healthcare

For healthcare professionals, the highest priority has to be the wellbeing of their patients. That extends beyond physical health to securing their Protected Health Information (PHI) - whether it’s in a computer or on a prescription, chart, wristband, or referral.

When it comes to managing critical patient records, organizations that provide or administer healthcare services face unique regulatory requirements:

HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) outlines the lawful use and disclosure of PHI in the United States to ensure sensitive patient information is protected and secured. A key element of HIPAA compliance is the way that identifiable health information is created, received, maintained, and transmitted electronically.

GDPR

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) extends the rights of individuals over Personally Identifiable Data (PID). Health organizations are subject to stricter guidelines regarding the collection, processing, and storage of PID. Regardless of geography, GDPR has global implications for any organization which has reason to store information about anyone who is a citizen of a European Union country.

Strike the right balance

So, how do you strike the right balance between remaining compliant while enabling easy printing, copying, scanning and faxing functions for your staff? End-to-end visibility is the first step in understanding what controls need to be in place to improve data security. In printing, features such as audit logs, automated reporting, digital signatures, and watermarking can all help bolster an organization’s compliance standards.

What does healthy printing look like?

In a complex and distributed print environment, it’s critical for organizations to quickly manage their print-related needs from a central location while ensuring the privacy of patient information. Fortunately, print management software has the prescription.

Support for mobile users wherever and whenever

The challenge

In many cases doctors, nurses and staff are extremely mobile, which means they struggle to access the right printer based on their constantly changing location. There is also the complicated layer of internal policies and legal requirements around handling and access patient data. With the rise of virtual care, the task of managing an entire endpoint fleet now seems monumental. Fortunately, health organizations can and do turn to technology like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to tackle these challenges. This does, however, open new challenges in the printing world when it comes to VDI. Even with a standard VDI solution users hit print and see a long list of printers. Forcing a user to search through a long list of printers is slow and error prone, leading to wasted time, frustration, and calls to IT support – who can spend hours managing this issue. With more distributed teams comes a need for more robust location-based print queues.

The solution

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) - enabled print management software

Healthcare providers - like so many large organizations with mobile workforces using a huge range of managed and personal devices - have turned to virtual desktops to deliver mission critical applications like EMRs to their users.

Virtual desktops have made it faster, easier and more cost effective than ever for staff to work in any consulting room, imaging lab, treatment center or hospital ward they need on any given day - from whatever tech they prefer to use on the go.

That’s where VDI-enabled print management software comes in. When integrated with virtualization platforms from Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft, it’s possible to dynamically identify where the user is physically located, enabling location-based printing. Long story short - by figuring out where the user is connecting from, it can then serve them a short list of only the printers physically nearby, so they won’t have to search through hundreds of options.

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