By Mat Buttrey, Senior Product Manager & Strategic Lead – Healthcare, PaperCut
LinkedIn: Matthew Buttrey
LinkedIn: PaperCut Software
In the digital era, technological developments are radically transforming healthcare, leading to improved patient care and operational efficiency. Yet, despite the rapid pace of technological advancement, the healthcare industry is still largely dominated by paper-based workflows and physical documents.
This means within a large healthcare organization, there may be thousands of printing devices spread across multiple buildings and locations. Finding a printout when it’s needed may not be an issue if your medical staff stay put. But today’s medical professionals are frequently moving between floors, clinics, offices, campuses, and specialist care centers, and need on-call access to printed material to remain efficient and focused on better patient outcomes.
Perhaps the answer is simply more printers? Well, in such a complex and fast-moving environment, installing new printers and managing print queues can pose a significant challenge for IT teams¬. To complicate matters further, doctors, nurses, and staff are often using their own devices and operating systems, leading to further resource demands. In effect, the priority should be the health of your patients, not your printers.
Additionally, the proliferation of cloud services and third-party integrations has made print systems more vulnerable to cyberattacks.
With limited visibility into the print ecosystem, it is more difficult than ever to safeguard critical patient data, and yet the stakes have never been higher. A 2024 study by IBM estimated the average cost of a data breach to be around $4.88 million—in the healthcare sector, this figure rose to almost $11 million.
On top of these considerations, healthcare organizations must comply with unique regulatory requirements for managing sensitive patient information. These include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU which increases the rights of individuals over personally identifiable information (PII), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the USA, which outlines the lawful use and disclosure of patient health information (PHI). In the case of HIPAA, compliance extends to the creation, storage, and transmission of electronic data.
At a healthcare organization, a healthy print infrastructure will allow your medical staff to focus on improving patient outcomes and experience without any obstacles, delays – or compliance risks.
Here’s what healthy printing looks like:
Easy mobile printing
With the rise of virtual and mobile care, healthcare staff are working from an increasingly diverse range of devices that must connect and print on demand. A growing number of distributed teams introduces the need for robust location-based queues, so that the user isn’t forced to scroll through every single printer on the network each time they want to print.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can tackle the challenge of mobile workforces using a mix of managed and personal devices, enabling healthcare professionals to work from any consulting room, imaging lab, treatment center, or hospital ward. Integrating with virtualization platforms, print management software can provide location-based printing so that the user is only served a short list of nearby printers, and can print securely without joining their device to a domain.
Streamlined print drivers and queues
The management of thousands of printers and users places a huge amount of demand on IT teams, as they expend significant time and energy in setting up queues and deploying print drivers. Organizations need an easy way to enable printing on all devices, regardless of the operating system or end-user permission level. But deploying every printer and driver to every user places a significant resource burden on the device, forcing it to load the driver for each deployed print queue every time it starts up.
Look for a solution that automatically identifies where the user’s device is physically located, dynamically adding local printers and removing distant ones. This means that the user only sees the precise queues and drivers they need, based on where they are—with the added benefit of minimizing the number of print queues an IT team needs to manage.
Seamless integrations
Healthcare organizations require easy interoperability between different systems that use printing, scanning, and faxing. However, there can be substantial cost, compatibility, and cybersecurity issues associated with integrating legacy systems like rostering, finance, and inventory management, with electronic medical record (EMR) applications and virtual solutions—making print management a challenging area to control.
The right print management solution will offer secure integrations for critical healthcare applications such as faxing, VDI, and EMR printing. Look for a cross-platform and vendor-neutral approach to simplify printing, faxing, and scanning workflows, helping manage user authentication across multiple systems and platforms.
Scan to fax capabilities
In healthcare, faxing is an essential method of securely transmitting patient data. However, because it has a separate workflow from regular printing, it can disrupt healthcare workers’ time management, as well as raising security concerns.
Print management solutions can now consolidate the user experience for healthcare workers, by unifying their faxing and print management workflows. With scan-to-fax capabilities, staff can send a fax at the same device they use for printing, through their nominated fax provider via secure HTTPS.
Security and compliance
One of the greatest challenges for healthcare organizations is to stay on top of security and data privacy, while ensuring easy accessibility for users. In a standard network printing environment, the job is sent directly to the printer where it prints immediately but may then sit in the tray, potentially leaving sensitive client information exposed.
Print management solutions can support HIPAA compliance, by securely handling all printed materials—whether patient records or pharmaceutical scripts. User authentication at the printer ensures that the correct person is standing at the device before the documents are released, preventing a print job from falling into the wrong hands. Added features such as watermarking, digital signatures, and audit logs can also help bolster your organization’s compliance standards.
But most importantly, a health print environment is one which delivers end-to-end visibility into the entire print ecosystem, which is fundamental to identifying and addressing any security vulnerabilities. By combining greater control, efficiency, and data privacy, the new world of print management is the best prescription for the printing needs of healthcare professionals.