Let’s face it: printing is not the most glamorous topic in the IT landscape. It’s not particularly inspiring or exciting when listed next to things like hyper-convergence, cloud computing, and digital transformation. Any IT manager will tell you how difficult it is to gather volunteers to handle the dreaded “print project”, and adding it to a meeting agenda can clear a board room pretty quickly.

In short, no sane IT professional wants to spend their days on printing, and so senior IT managers will often bring in Print Vendors to tackle the problem on their behalf. Then, after signing a 3-5 year Managed Print Service (MPS) contract with a print vendor, the expectation is that all of the organizations print issues will magically disappear. Unfortunately, this is usually a pipe dream.

Despite all the advances in virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, printing still continues to be a vital function within the healthcare industry. Healthcare organizations running a wide printing infrastructure can be challenging.

In particular, large hospitals with widely dispersed zones and highly mobile printing environments need every moment of their time taking care of patients. In the case of St. Joseph Health (SJH), their CIO and IT team had been struggling with Meditech printing issues in their Citrix environment.

For those working in the healthcare industry know, Epic boasts some of the most widely used EMR software solutions for hospital and healthcare organizations and an Epic printing solution can be very valuable, if it were easy to install, manage and most of all easy to maintain. This is especially true in an Epic-hosted VDI environment.

While VDI technology has allowed for fast and secure access to Epic applications for roaming healthcare users, location-based printing can still be problematic. The larger the hospital or healthcare organization, the harder it becomes to deliver fast and reliable printing output such as physician orders, prescription labels, patient wristbands, and other important documents.

When it comes to print traffic and data flow, there is a major difference between physical desktop printing and virtualized desktop printing. Physical desktop printing is simply print traffic flowing from a workstation to a printer.

The issue with VDI printing is that there is no way to eliminate print traffic from going through the WAN, which will inherently cause bandwidth and latency problems. So what are the best options for eliminating bandwidth and print speed issues in a VDI environment?