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.

Over the past several years with digital transformation, the healthcare industry has been undergoing major changes. One obvious change is the transition from paper records to digital records by hospitals, doctor’s, clinics, and other facilities.

With a lot of news coverage and changes with technology, the terms EMR and EHR are often mixed up, leading to some confusion.

There are quite a few differences between EMR and EHR. Below we outline the major differences and some challenges healthcare workers may be facing EMR and EHR printing.

Despite all the advances in digitalization and imaging technology, printing continues to be a critical function for the healthcare industry. UniPrint Infinity’s Healthcare Printing Suite (HPS) enables speedy, error-free, and on demand secure printing from major EHS/EMR applications, with 100% uptime.

Deploying the UniPrint Infinity HPS, hospitals and health organizations benefit from optimized clinical workflows, reduced printing costs, and improved quality of patient care while eliminating data breaches when printing.

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.