It’s well publicised that the healthcare sector is facing challenges – from rising costs and staff shortages, to increasing demand for services, recovery from the duress of the global Covid pandemic, and on top of it all, demands for more investment in digital health.
Over five years ago the UK National Health Service published its plans to go paperless.
In 2023, UK national newspaper The Times accessed records for NHS England, the health organisation which manages the NHS, which showed that hospitals spent more than £234 million ($284 million) on the storage of paper medical records in the year to April 2022. This equates to an enormous number of printed materials still being produced and stored, despite the aims set out in 2018.
An earlier source from the USA in 2018 showed that on average a 1,500-bed hospital was printing 96M pages each year — at a cost of $3.8M. With the average 1,500-bed hospital printing 8 million-plus pages a month, according to the report at an average cost of $0.04 per page, this equates to spending $3.8million on printing annually. And even if the numbers have reduced since then, progress towards a paperless healthcare system appears slow.
Print management seems a small piece of a much larger puzzle, but it can have an important part to play. If you have already implemented PaperCut in your healthcare print technology with the aim of reducing waste, increasing print security, and simplifying print management, you might be wondering if there is a better way to view it all?
This blog post looks at advanced analytics for print and considers how it can add value to your healthcare organization and further leverage the investment you’ve already made in print management.
Here are two key areas to consider:
Tangible costs
The visible waste of printing is the cost of consumables, and wasted paper due to duplicate prints, and uncollected print jobs. As even the cheapest printer ink can cost twice as much per ounce as Dom Pérignon Champagne, this cost can have an impact!
Intangible costs
The intangible costs are around end user productivity - the time taken to manage printers, wait for printers to reset and for clinicians waiting for printed patient information. These intangible costs have a considerable impact on time and budgets for patient care.
Driving more value from your investment in PaperCut
The good news is that if you’ve already invested in PaperCut for print management, you should already be:
- Making cost savings through more effective printing
- Ensuring the confidentiality of patient information sent to printers
- Making printing easy so that healthcare staff & IT can focus on more important work
However, we find that many users still face challenges around data visibility. Creating regular reports from print management software can be time consuming. And it’s not always easy to drill from a high level-view down into the detail that you need to really understand what’s going on.
Intuitive has developed a range of easy-to-use visual print analytics dashboards allowing users to analyse their print, scan and copy data. Using data sourced directly from PaperCut, Intuitive for PaperCut dashboards allow you to answer these key questions around your printing:
- Which devices are being over and underutilized across the entire organisation?
- How is print demand generated across the hospital?
- How can we drive our print costs down by using more efficient devices?
- Can we get early insight into volume trends for different parts of the organisation?
- How are different departments/teams using our print fleet?
- Where are the print hotspots across the entire organisation?
- How do volumes compare for colour/mono, simplex/duplex, print/scan?
- Are we achieving our environmental targets for reducing print usage?
In addition, another key benefit is in using your print data to identify paper-heavy processes that are just right for digital transformation. Spotting those regular small print jobs that are repeated hundreds of thousands of times each week that are taking up valuable time with patients is easy if you have advanced analytics at your disposal. This is a great place to start if you are looking for manual processes that can be automated using RPA.
So, if you need a simple to use dashboard solution, designed to make data interaction easy for end users without any technical input, which provides easy navigation through your print data to answer queries that you might have, Intuitive for PaperCut could be for you.
Interested to find out more? Speak to the PaperCut sales team to get started.
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