A CUSTOMER GUIDE TO COMPLIANCE AND PRINTING IN HEALTHCARE

Helping compliance while enabling printing workflows

Your highest priority is the well-being and safety

of your patients. That extends beyond their

physical health, to protecting their PHI. With

prescriptions, charts, wristbands, and referrals

floating around, this can be a difficult area to

control. But too much control and you take away

imperative time from your staff.

A 2008 study posted by the Institute for

Healthcare Improvement did a time and motion

study to see where surgical nurses in the US spent their time. Their conclusion? Three

subcategories accounted for most of nursing practice time: documentation (35.3%; 147.5

minutes), medication administration (17.2%; 72 minutes), and care coordination (20.6%; 86

minutes). Making sure printing challenges don’t contribute or (heaven forbid) add more time to

these subcategories means nurses are spending more time delivering safe, high-quality patientcentric care.

So how do you strike the right balance between remaining compliant while enabling easy printing

functions for your staff?

Printing visibility – know who’s printing what and when

End-to-end visibility is a foundation for IT security. Why? Because it lets you predict, prevent,

detect, and if necessary, contain security issues. PaperCut MF has print visibility as a core feature;

it keeps job-by-job audit logs for every print, copy, and scan sent through your printers.

Having visibility is the first step in understanding what controls you need to put in place to:

► improve printed document security

► ensure your data is used fairly and correctly

► encourage and celebrate those individuals doing the right thing

How to get more visibility into your printing

Print logs

The starting point for print visibility is a centralized, detailed job log. This also often referred to as

a printer audit log or printer event log. The print log contains the date, time, printer used,

username, document name (now we’re talking), and some other stuff that comes in handy from

time to time like size in bytes, originating machine, driver type, and more. Let’s not skip over the

centralized part! All this data can be found in one web-based user interface, and the scope of the

log can be for the entire organization, per user, per printer, and filtered even further.

Reporting

The presentation of any data collected through

logs is imperative for it to be interpreted,

actioned, and shared.

Executive Summary reports give a single,

compelling view into your organization’s current

state of printing, like the most active users or the

highest printing devices. These are the first clues

of where to focus a deeper dive into the data.

PaperCut MF has 80+ standard reports that

output to PDF, HTML, and CSV and cover all perspectives of data from summary to detailed pertransaction logs. So we’ve done the heavy lifting here for you.

Print archiving

Log more than just the print event (time, which printer, who printed, etc.). Also archive the whole

job’s contents – text and images – so approved administrators can actually see the contents of the

print job itself.

Watermarking and Digital Signatures

Move visibility from beyond the print log used by System Administrator to the printed document

itself, with watermarking and digital signatures. A print document watermark can be as simple as

a date and username on each page, through to something more advanced like a digital signature.

These visual marks are a great motivator for people not to leave sensitive stuff laying around

because its origin is always visible!

Interested in learning more?