User Stories: Healthcare Director of IT Celebrates Huge ROI

What is your job role and responsibilities at your Sunrise Health Region? I’m Sheranga Jayasinghe, and I am the Director of IT at Sunrise Health Region. I manage the IT Department for the Sunrise Health Region which is one of 13 health regions in Saskatchewan, Canada. Our services at Sunrise Health Region include acute care, long-term care, community services, public health and mental health. We manage 18 sites. Can you describe your IT environment? We are a complete virtual environment. Our VDI environment consist of Citrix Xendesktop running a Windows OS. Our Clinical applications are hosted provincially and we access them via published desktops. (Citrix XenApp). We support 5000 users, close to 2500 Zero clients and 300 or so shared printers. What types of challenges were you facing in your specific role? From a strategic perspective, it had a lot to do with what we wanted to do with virtualization. We wanted to virtualize every component that goes to presenting the desktop to our end users. We faced three main challenges in our printing environment that needed to be solved: We have a huge Citrix farm, so when a new printer was introduced, a new native driver had to be installed on all these individual servers Location based printing, instead of mapping the printing to the users, we wanted to map the printers to the device, so when the user log in, the printer would, by default, get attached to the session, so the user can print to the closest printer. We wanted to virtualize our users printing. The same way a user can take their VDI with them, we wanted a way to take their print job to go with them as well. This made sense from an EMR point of view because within the EMR, there was no way of refreshing their printers, once logged in. So we wanted the ability to print to one virtual print queue and then our end-user can simply go wherever, authenticate and then grab their print job. These challenges caused a lot of inefficiencies in our system, with administrators constantly having to spend a large amount of time fixing these issues and end users having to wait for their print issues to be fixed.

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  From your point of view, how has Uniprint Infinity helped solve your issues?  Were there any differences? UniPrint Infinity has truly exceeded our expectations. We have seen a huge return on investment with our deployment of UniPrint Infinity! On average, we were losing about two hours of staff time per 12-hour shift. Today, the task requires less than two minutes of staff time per shift—all while increasing the number of records handled from approximately 10,000 per month to upward of 50,000. It has also given us the opportunity to optimize our printer environment. In the past because of the “Driver” challenges we had we had to limit the type of printers we supported. As a result, the type of printer was based on what IT can support vs. what the user wants. But with the UniPrint PDF-based UPD we no longer have driver issues. So we are now able to deploy the printer that meets the end user needs. We also no longer have to purchase high-end printers that cost $3,000. We can use $500 printers, and the UniPrint driver is the only print server that needs to be updated. This initiative has resulted in more than $100,000 in savings over the last 18 months. What do you like best about UniPrint? UniPrint is an excellent company to work with. When we evaluate a vendor, we look for three things.

• How they view the customer
• Their product
• Their support

Uniprint excels in all three areas. They don’t view you the customer as another transaction. They see you as a partner, which is extremely important because what it means is that their success is your success. In other words, they understand for them to be successful they want the customer to be successful. Not many companies view the customer this way. This also means the company is willing to listen to you and grow with you, incorporate your ideas, walk with you into the unknown etc. Most importantly, they value the “relationship” and not the “Dollar Value” of the transaction. UniPrint has an excellent customer experience team. We have never come across a company who would be so responsive and flexible guiding us through the install, implementation and post deployment support. I do not believe that we would have had the success we have today if not for UniPrint and its products. Most organizations stop at virtualizing their desktops. But we wanted to be a “Complete” virtual shop and printing was part a big part of it. UniPrint helped us achieve that. Were there any issues you that came across? No, there were any issues that we came across with UniPrint Infinity. Everything seems to work perfectly! Would you recommend UniPrint Infinity to other Directors of IT? I would recommend UniPrint Infinity to other Directors of IT to deploy!