Digital Transformation in the Healthcare Industry

As the “going digital” trend rapidly gains popularity across the corporate world, industries across the board are looking to digital transformation to answer their security, workflow efficiency and productivity problems!

The healthcare industry is at the forefront of this shift towards a digital world!

With the healthcare industry hosting dynamic, fast-paced, and complex work environments, requiring up to the minute patient data, healthcare organizations were looking for an all-encompassing solution to their challenges.

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

EHR applications now allow members of the healthcare team to create, access, update, manage, and share detailed patient history with other members of the healthcare team, in an entirely digital format, with no paper involved!

Although the advent of the EHR has allowed physicians to make better informed decisions pertaining to patient care, it also comes with its fair share of security risks.

With patient data confidentiality being the most critical security issue in the healthcare field, ensuring complete security for EHR applications is vital!

Developments in EHR Printing

It would seem as though printing would decrease after the inception of the EHR era, however, surprisingly, even after the shift from paper to electronic records, printing is still on the rise!

Recent studies suggest that an abnormally high number of pages-per-day are being printed by users in healthcare settings, even after implementing and adopting EHR systems at their workplaces!

The reason behind such lopsided figures may be due to members of the healthcare team lacking comprehensive knowledge of EHR applications and their sharing features, subsequently resorting to printing patient documents instead, along with an unnecessary number of printers being housed in most healthcare organizations!

Security Concerns Related to EHR Printing

The excess printers in a healthcare setting represent a significant security risk, simply due to the fact that they are connected to the network, and therefore engaged in storing and passing data.

With printer security usually being overlooked when it comes to IT security measures, this can be rather worrying for healthcare organizations, for whom patient data confidentiality is vital.

Along with printers, the lifecycle of printed documents containing confidential patient information is an equally important security concern.

With the number of printed pages easily exceeding a million every month across most healthcare organizations, the likelihood that all documents are disposed of securely and safely is understandably quite low.

Consequently, the probability of a confidentiality breach is real!

Ideal Printing Solutions for EHR Environments

Printing is critical to healthcare, and with increasing privacy concerns relating to confidential patient information, it is vital for healthcare organizations to adopt print solutions that enable secure and error-free printing.

Protection regulations like the Safe Harbor compliance agreement also require healthcare organizations to ensure that patient data is protected at rest, in transit, and during use.

Printing comes into the equation when looking at patient data-in use and how it is protected while in use.  Consequently, healthcare providers should look for printing solutions that ensure printed data is accessed by users who are authorized to access and use it!

UniPrint Infinity Solution for Healthcare Printing

UniPrint Infinity’s Healthcare Printing Suite (HPS) provides a printing solution for healthcare organizations using EHR and EMR, and enables speedy, error-free, and on demand secure printing, with 100% printing uptime.

The HPS allows healthcare team members to print securely and on-demand to any printer, including label and prescription printers.  The HPS solution also provides the necessary smart label and smart route printing mechanisms to avoid print job routing complications while healthcare professionals are printing on the move between various departments within a hospital, subsequently ensuring that print jobs get routed to the closest printer, while printing to the specific speciality printer that the print jobs are designed for.

UniPrint Infinity also offers secure pull printing devices that enable multi-factor authentication through tapping and then entering print job release codes.

These output management devices would be excellent tools to ensure printed documents are not accessed by unauthorized users.

Such solutions could significantly assist healthcare organizations in their journey towards guaranteeing patient data confidentiality and achieving compliance with regulations such as the Safe Harbor compliance agreement.