MEDITECH has a large and devoted customer base of healthcare providers, thanks to the company’s industry-leading electronic medical records (EMR) solutions. However, as many IT professionals will tell you, it can be challenging to ensure smooth, reliable EMR printing in certain MEDITECH environments.

That’s partly because EMR printing in general is tightly regulated. As such, it involves a lot of additional security and auditing considerations. It’s also because EMR printing with MEDITECH relies on the use of the company’s proprietary print-server technology. Print servers are essential to the way the software sends print jobs and enforces secure printing.

Which means print servers can’t be eliminated in MEDITECH environments. But the good news is that they can be managed more efficiently with PrinterLogic. That goes for healthcare organizations’ in-house IT departments as well as providers of managed print services.

First, let’s look at the main challenge in EMR printing when using MEDITECH solutions.

Consistency is required—but not easy

One of the biggest hurdles in any print environment, healthcare or otherwise, is ensuring consistency across the entire organization. Without a print infrastructure that’s designed for ease of administration and single-portal manageability, that can be hard to do.

In MEDITECH scenarios, ensuring consistency becomes even more difficult. Why? Well, MEDITECH recommends having redundant servers in place for the sake of high availability. When changes such as software updates or printer installations are made, those changes have to be replicated across all of the primary print servers as well as their backups.

That creates a management headache for admins. But it’s an absolute migraine for managed print services providers, who can sometimes be responsible for multiple MEDITECH customers. One tiny update could mean having to check into every single print server across several MEDITECH print environments.

Along with being incredibly tedious, this lack of automation and unified oversight increases the risk of human error.

PrinterLogic lets healthcare end users re-focus on patient care

The complexity of print management with MEDITECH EMR solutions often plays out in day-to-day printing. If a change doesn’t get carried out on a particular print server, for example, then EMR printing will obviously be affected for end users. And in healthcare, your end users are going to be medical professionals and staff whose goal is patient care above all else.

PrinterLogic’s intuitive, centralized management consolidates the entire MEDITECH print environment under one admin console. That allows IT staff and managed print services providers to make changes once and have them populate across all print servers. They can also monitor and manage print queues from a single pane of glass.

For end users, that simplicity of printer and driver management translates to more reliable EMR printing. Healthcare staff and medical professionals can instead focus on delivering top-notch care to their patients instead of struggling with printers.

By the same token, PrinterLogic also contributes to more secure printing. Admins and managed print services providers are able to keep track of print activity across the environment far more easily. And end users can be more confident that their confidential print jobs will go to the correct destination printers.

Proven, real-world results

Princeton Community Hospital in West Virginia operates a multi-site MEDITECH environment with a printer fleet of around 700 devices. Their IT department turned to PrinterLogic in the hopes of fixing a recurring—and inexplicable—glitch that would regularly knock all their background MEDITECH print servers offline. They could only be restored through a manual reboot.

Not only did the hospital’s IT staff solve their mysterious server issues, they also achieved simplified printer installation through PrinterLogic. Now when an end user needs a new printer, the helpdesk just emails a link that takes care of everything. PrinterLogic improved driver management as well. Incorrect driver assignments are a thing of the past. Read the case study here.

If you want to restore sanity, predictability and consistency to EMR printing with MEDITECH too, why not take PrinterLogic for a test drive? Sign up today for a free 30-day trial of our PrinterLogic Web Stack solution.

There’s a common saying in IT that most enterprise printing problems start with print drivers, not printers. How true that is will probably vary from environment to environment. But one thing’s for sure: Print drivers are a constant pain point.

Some of the Biggest Print Driver Headaches

In traditional print environments, driver updates are one of the most dreaded IT tasks. And the difficulty of updating only increases with scale. Driver updates in enterprise organizations are going to involve a lot more work simply because there are more client computers to deal with.

Scale isn’t the only issue. The update process itself is also inefficient. When a manufacturer releases a new print driver, the updated version might fix some existing bugs. There’s also a risk that it will introduce new ones. As a result, many admins and managed print services providers test new drivers before deploying those drivers to the entire user base. Although that doesn’t guarantee that things will go smoothly.

That’s where driver updates can get even more tedious. Rolling back problematic drivers after they’re deployed is a multi-step hassle for admins. It’s even less fun for end users, who usually have no idea that their print driver has been updated. All they know is that they can no longer print or that their documents aren’t printing like they should. So they call the helpdesk, which triggers a cascade of damage control and creates more work for everyone.

More Caveats and Conflicts

Drivers come saddled with other baggage too. If manufacturers don’t provide a model-specific driver for a particular computer, you have to find a workaround. That can force admins to use a driver for a similar model, which runs the risk of incompatibility and limited features. Or it means using a universal driver, which might bring more stability but doesn’t always support the full range of printing functionality.

And in the interest of time, it’s probably best not to open the can of worms that is 32- and 64-bit print-driver conflicts.

The list of potential problems with drivers is long, but their effect can be summed up in one word: downtime. Whether a rogue driver causes an entire print spooler to crash or a version incompatibility prevents a single user from printing in one application, it compromises your enterprise printing capabilities and causes productivity to suffer. End users, technical support staff and admins are all inconvenienced in the long run.

The Serverless Printing Solution to Print Driver Problems

PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure is designed to support organizations of all sizes and use cases—from managed print services providers to internal enterprise IT departments.

When it comes to driver management, PrinterLogic has at least two huge advantages over traditional printing solutions:

• Centralized administration: Even if your enterprise print environment is spread across multiple locations in multiple countries, PrinterLogic’s centralized admin console lets you manage and deploy printer objects from a single pane of glass. Adding, updating and removing drivers can be accomplished in just a few clicks. It doesn’t matter whether the change applies to one user or an entire pool.
• Direct IP printing: One-to-one connections between clients and printers is recognized as one of the most robust printing methods. In the off chance that driver issues do occur, they remain isolated. It also makes drivers easier to deploy, troubleshoot, roll back and update.

Lamar Consolidated Independent School District’s experience is a perfect example of how PrinterLogic unites power with ease of use in driver management.

This school district is comprised of 45 locations over a 400-square-mile area in Texas. Its printer fleet numbers over 1,000 devices from several manufacturers like Ricoh, HP, Dell and Canon. Yet PrinterLogic enables admins to manage the common driver repository effortlessly and apply driver changes to 22,000 workstations with instant effect. Read the case study here.

With PrinterLogic, managed print services providers and companies can regain control of their enterprise printing while eliminating print servers and other expensive, outdated print infrastructure. To see how PrinterLogic outperforms your existing printing solutions in every way, sign up today and download your free 30-day trial.

Print servers have been the default solution in enterprise printing for a long time. Too long.

Admins and other IT professionals are certainly aware of the problems with print servers. These are shortcomings like single points of failure, limited manageability and ongoing licensing costs. But print servers have managed to stick around in spite of that. There’s a lingering assumption that, as imperfect as print servers are, they’re the best option that today’s business printing solutions have to offer.

PrinterLogic puts an end to that assumption once and for all.

Our next-gen serverless printing infrastructure enables companies of any size to completely eliminate print servers from their environment. More than that, PrinterLogic brings added functionality, higher print availability and greater ease of use than legacy printing solutions could ever hope to achieve.

The PrinterLogic Admin Console 

One of PrinterLogic’s main benefits is centralized administration on top of its robust direct IP printing platform.

With PrinterLogic’s centralized admin console, IT can manage every printer in the entire organization from just one place. Got offices in Tuscaloosa, Tallahassee, Toronto and Tacoma? Well, it doesn’t matter how distributed your organization is. You can easily add, change and remove printers across several locations from a single pane of glass.

The tree view of the web-based console is super intuitive. It lets you drill down by country, state or region, building and even floor number. From there admins can effortlessly manage dozens of print settings. That includes everything from changing the name of the printer to applying cost-saving monochrome printer profiles by default.

Organizations like Clark County, Nevada have seen those results firsthand. Using PrinterLogic SaaS, they’re now able to manage a dynamic print environment that spans 38 departments and more than 60 locations. And they do it all with “plug and play” simplicity and “incredible” uptime. Read the case study here.

The PrinterLogic Self-Service Installation Portal

In business printing, sometimes an adversarial relationship develops between end users and IT. End users just want to print their Microsoft Word or Google Sheets document to a nearby printer. Admins know that printing isn’t always so simple.

Unlike traditional printing solutions, PrinterLogic views end users as an asset. Our self-service installation portal empowers them to quickly find and safely install printers on their own. Using the optional floor plan maps, they can easily identify their preferred printer and install it—plus any related drivers—with a single click.

Speed and efficiency aren’t the only advantages. The added bonus is that end users don’t have to call the helpdesk. Not even if they’re at a remote location. That saves admins from having to take time out to perform routine printer installs.

By empowering end users in this way, PrinterLogic can significantly reduce printer-related helpdesk costs compared to legacy printing solutions.

The Cincinnati Police Department told us that PrinterLogic’s true effectiveness is measured by how quiet their helpdesk phones are (read the case study here). After choosing PrinterLogic for its ability to eliminate print servers and simplify end-user installations, the CPD also saw more uptime and streamlined deployments.

The PrinterLogic Client

The PrinterLogic client is a low-overhead software agent that admins can deploy to Windows, macOS or Linux workstations. Among other things, it’s responsible for establishing the robust direct IP connections between workstations and authorized printers.

The client is what makes it possible for end users to continue printing during, say, a WAN outage. That’s a time when consolidated print servers would otherwise be inaccessible. It also allows back-end changes to be carried out in real time. If an admin changes a printer profile setting, the client will make sure that setting is reflected during the next automatic refresh. There’s no need for end users to reboot.

End Your Dependency on Print Servers for Good 

Those unique features are just a few reasons why PrinterLogic is the best software choice for business printing. The serverless infrastructure that underpins both our on-prem (PrinterLogic Web Stack) and cloud (PrinterLogic SaaS) printing solutions has many more advantages too.

So isn’t it high time that print servers finally joined 56k modems and floppy disks in the history books. Eliminate print servers—along with all their cost and headache—from your company’s print environment with PrinterLogic’s single integrated platform. Sign up for your free 30-day trial of PrinterLogic today. You’ll see how easy and cost-effective it is to leave legacy printing solutions behind.