When you think about the technologies that hospitals spend millions of dollars on annually, printers probably don’t top the list but they should. Experts say hospitals are seeing as much as an 11 percent increase in their annual print volumes driven by Meaningful Use, the Affordable Care Act, ICD-10, and the adoption of electronic record-keeping (EMR/EHR) methodologies. At the same time, healthcare IT experts have begun to realize they have little visibility into their organizations’ print assets or operations, something which often leads to stockpiling of supplies and, all too often, to a mismatch of equipment and needs. Recognizing this, Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), today announced availability of its Managed Print Services (MPS) for Healthcare, a cloud-based offering specifically designed to generate cost savings by monitoring print activity and providing analytics and automated alerts to optimize supply orders and service requests.
“Sometimes we let the cool new technologies in our industry get in the way of caring for simple, yet really important things that can reduce costs and improve quality,”says Ed Simcox, Practice Leader, Logicalis Healthcare Solutions. “We all use and walk past printers every day in a hospital setting, but how often do we stop and ask if we’re using these assets to the best of our ability? Are things being printed unnecessarily leading us to overpay for and underutilize these assets? How much money do we spend managing these printers, and how many calls does the help desk get? While it may sound mundane, these are important questions to ask. Everyone is doing more with less money, and hospitals are looking for places to save costs without affecting patient care; with a service-focused partner providing proper oversight, you can literally save millions of dollars enterprise-wide by instituting best practices in a managed print solution.”
Case in Point
One of the world’s leading cancer research institutes was considering updating an aging fleet of more than 2,500 printers with a significant number of locally attached USB devices. After trying for 60 days to manually sift through and compile data from paper reports related to print volumes and other pertinent statistics, a consultant who had originally been assigned the task of developing three- and five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) projections estimated he would need at least six months to complete the data collection in order to assess potential savings areas. freedigitalphotos.net technology, however, was able to automate the data collection and report results in significantly less time, quickly identifying three-year TCO reductions in excess of $500,000.
Eight Little Known Facts about Healthcare Printing
- Output Growth: Experts say annual print volumes are increasing by as much as 9 percent in black and white and 19 percent in color print processes, 11 percent overall.
- Per-User Costs: Analysts estimate that the average healthcare employee generates between $850 and $1,000 per year in document output costs.
- Help Desk Woes: As many as half of all calls to a hospital’s help desk are related to print issues.
- Waste Reduction: Up to 25 percent of consumables and parts are wasted, something which can often be significantly reduced with predictive ordering.
- Ink the Deal: Early cartridge replacement prompts are responsible for as much as 15% of ink supplies waste.
- Be Aware: Desktop-connected printers can be the most expensive component of the printer fleet on a per-page basis, tend to be underutilized, have more expensive supplies, and are complex to track and manage.
- Significant Savings: A first-year average return on investment for a Managed Print Service solution is as high as 35 percent of the hospital’s print-related expenses.
- HIPAA-Safe: Managed Print Service providers never see the actual documents, just the volume data, which means there is no possibility for a HIPAA violation to occur.
Want to Learn More?
- Could your organization save millions of dollars by controlling and managing print-related assets and costs? Find out here:http://ow.ly/NSXYp.
- Download a Logicalis Healthcare Solutions white paper, “”Best Practices for Print Service Management””: http://ow.ly/NSXzh.
- Find out how to choose a managed service provider, then explore six surprise benefits of managed services: http://ow.ly/N9NGA.
