With digital transformation that is taking place in today’s world, every industry is looking for ways to enhance efficiency and maximize productivity through the effective implementation of technology.

The healthcare industry is no exception!

The nature of the healthcare industry makes it a fast-paced working environment, with medical professionals requiring up to the minute patient data.

This is where the electronic health record (EHR) came into the picture!

Sensitive healthcare data is more vulnerable today than ever before. Personal medical records, social security numbers, corporate trade secrets are all stored, used and transmitted online through networked devices.

This overflowing stream of patient data prevents hackers with an increasing wide range of opportunities to steal and sell intellectual property.

Healthcare organizations are also at risk from internal threats. A disgruntled employee can expose confidential data even faster than a hacker if there are not adequate safeguards in place to prevent security breaches.

My name is Adam Flowers, and I am a lead solutions architect here at the American Red Cross. The team that I am on is called End User Technologies Solutions, which is the architect or engineering level for the EUS group which is desktop support or service desk support.

Being on the IT team, I am tasked with IT support for a multitude of different organizations and end user classifications. I support full-time employees, part-time employees, and the volunteer staff as well. We have such a diverse printing environment – so many different printer models, many different set-ups, and of course we had home users that had wireless printers in their homes or USB attached printers out there.

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.