Is my organization doing everything it can to secure patient health information?
In 2023 alone, the healthcare industry experienced an unprecedented wave of data breaches that left 133 million sensitive patient records exposed, stolen, or impermissibly disclosed. It’s time to ask yourself: Is my organization doing everything it can to secure patient health information (PHI)?
The first step is to acknowledge the security problems caused by outdated, siloed, legacy systems for end user print and output management. These inflexible systems put you at risk of noncompliance and could be leaving your organization vulnerable to breaches.
Relying on cobbled-together solutions that require manual workarounds, resource-intensive homegrown systems, or on-prem output management systems (while your EMR partners are moving to the cloud) isn’t going to cut it.
Make the choice to move forward.
Start with these five best practices to address your print security and create a more unified, streamlined, compliant future.
Optimize Print Management Processes
Managing users on multiple systems, manually deploying updates to various devices, or even setting up and managing scripting and GPOs are workarounds that consume too many of your resources. Your team should be focused on high-value work, not maintaining print servers and other legacy technology.
Implement a solution that allows you to centralize and automate your entire print environment, ditching manual workarounds and eliminating print servers. From native integrations with leading Identity Providers (IdPs) to automated deployments of drivers, updates, and user changes, any solution you select should allow you to transform your print environment, optimizing processes, reducing your team’s print-related workload, and allowing them to focus on more important initiatives. Admins can manage all print from one console, deploy changes automatically, and empower end users with features like the Self-Service Printer Installation Portal. You’ll get to eliminate print servers and the security risk they pose and recover significant efficiencies.
“From a resource perspective alone, [Vasion Print (formerly PrinterLogic)] has really lowered a lot of our overhead—from infrastructure to personnel. It helps us get everything under the same umbrella. It takes things off the back of the IT department and gives the user more power to control their printing.”
Adam Dishong, Sr. Systems Engineer of Saber Healthcare Group
Optimize Print Management Processes
If you’re still managing your end user print and output management in separate systems, you may be exposing your environment to potential vulnerabilities from multiple entry points and unsupervised data outflow. Unify your print activity so you can automate, monitor, and optimize document delivery through a centralized intuitive interface, on a cloud-native SaaS platform, engineered to protect critical documents and data.
Your critical document workflows can continue without interruption, even in the event of system failures or outages, while your teams stay in the know with real-time status updates, ensuring documents reach their intended destinations, quashing uncertainty, and keeping operations highly reliable. You gain ultimate flexibility in assigning infrastructure to handle the flow of demand. And robust security features to protect sensitive PHI during transmission and storage, assuring only authorized users have access to critical information. Patient data is kept secure and encrypted, so your team can focus on what matters most: helping clinic staff better serve the patients who rely on their care and services.
Make documents available to the right people at the right time.
EHR and EMR Connectors
Leverage direct connectors for your Epic and Oracle Health systems to unify and manage front- and back-end printing from a single admin console.
API Print Service
Connect your web-based applications, not natively equipped to communicate with printing protocols, to your printers through API post requests.
Rules & Routing
Automate management and routing of documents based on key characteristics, conditions, users, devices, and more without manual intervention.
Confirmed Delivery
Ensure high-volume and critical print jobs are delivered successfully with bidirectional communication from the printer to receive updates on a print job’s current status.
Batch Printing
Configure batches of documents to print in a specific order every time, ensuring complex processes remain standardized and efficient across your organization.
Boost Efficiency and Security by Automating Repetitive IT Tasks
Overworked people make mistakes. The sysadmin meant to deploy those patches. The last team that tried to address a previous data leak by introducing new processes only to see little uptake. It’s a never-ending story: data risks are overlooked, necessary patches are slow to deploy, and corners cut on meeting compliance processes. The truth is you need to recover as much time and resources as you can, so determining how you can automate more is at the top of your mind.
Start by automating repetitive print management tasks like system updates, printer deployments, and routine print server maintenance, to alleviate workloads, boost efficiency, and increase security by reducing overwork. Next, automate more time-consuming processes like document delivery, document redirections, and print queue management.
Setting up workflows traditionally takes a lot of time and resources, but it doesn’t have to. Your teams can create workflows for tasks like monitoring network performance, managing user access, and creating printer redirection workflows from one solution. You can even automate reports to ensure that everything is running smoothly. This streamlined approach enhances operational efficiency, lowering operational costs, but even more importantly, frees your team up to work on the security initiatives you know will be critical to protecting systems in the future.
Build-in HIPAA Compliant Printing Practices
Security breaches not only compromise the trust of your patients, but also cost millions of dollars and countless hours to amend. Documents left abandoned in printer trays or improperly disposed of can contain confidential PHI, exposing your organization to many unnecessary risks.
725
healthcare security breaches in 2023
$11m
average cost per breach
$7.9b
spent on data breaches last year
Printed PHI can sometimes get overlooked: papers get left on printer trays, patients get the wrong discharge paperwork, or duplicates get printed. You and your team must be able to control what’s printed and who receives it to mitigate any risk of regulatory violations.
Reduce the risk of unmonitored printed PHI by requiring Secure Release Printing, eliminating the chance for unprotected documents to be left in the printer tray. Plus, maintain a detailed audit trail of printer history, gain the ability to create special rules managing the type of information that can be printed, and create AI-enabled workflows that can redact print jobs in real time to protect sensitive PHI.
Minimize Risk by Automating Document Routing Without Tech Debt
One of the largest security challenges is implementing rules and policies that prevent unauthorized users from printing and accessing patient information. When you’re optimizing print and document management, consider if your clinical workflows are HIPAA-ready and if not, evaluate automated workflows that will help you meet compliance standards. HIPAA-ready workflows ensure that sensitive patient information is securely stored and shared, reducing the risk of unmonitored printed documentation, and the associated costs and security concerns of printing, storing, and disposing of physical documents.
By leveraging Rules & Routing, you have complete control over every print job, ensuring that each one adheres to automated, custom-configured rules. An automation engine should include the ability to perform AI document interrogation, classification, and HIPAA-compliant data redaction, to help you level up your ability to deliver a secure environment, and setting you up to leverage your choice of AI in the future—a possibility you can only achieve with a cloud solution.
This shift not only streamlines administrative processes but also enhances patient privacy and data security, aligning with regulatory standards. Plus, it gives you the flexibility and adaptability to update your processes and technology without completely reworking your environment in the future.
“Vasion Print (formerly PrinterLogic)] will enable us to do things we always wanted and are actually mandated to do for certain levels of printing. That will revolutionize the patient care procedures for the doctors and nurses.”
Chris Patten, Senior Server Engineer of EPIC Management L.P.
Secure Control of Your Mission Critical, Document-Based Processes
Are you ready to implement these best practices for print security? Learn how Output Automation and Vasion Print deliver enterprise-grade security, purposefully designed to protect critical documents and data. Built with a Zero Trust approach, and certified by SOC and ISO standards, Vasion can help you unify your print environments, delivering the highest levels of security and compliance for your healthcare organization today.
Simplify Operations
Unified Management
Automate Workflows
AI Integrations
Secure Local Printing
Eliminate Waste
Are you ready to implement these best practices for print security?
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