A guide to easy and secure Cerner printing with PaperCut

An Introduction to printing via Cerner EMR and PaperCut

A guide to easy and secure Cerner printing with PaperCut

Cerner Millennium suite is one of the market-leading EMR solutions worldwide. It boasts a robust and well-tested printing subsystem, that is capable of handling complex workflows and different types of print jobs, including wristbands, labels, reports, discharge orders, and care plans. Managing such a wide variety of Cerner printing utilities, however, can quickly become complex and time-consuming for the System Administrator.

On top of that, because we are dealing with Protected Health Information (PHI), it’s vital that the proper print security measures are implemented. With HIPAA legislation, a patient record printed and forgotten on a printer, or a lab report printed to the wrong printer can easily become a compliance disaster.

Printing with Cerner

The Cerner printing backend is powered by the CUPS printing system. The printer management is done through the combination of the Cerner Olympus frontend and CUPS print management. Changes to print queues and workflows can be carried out from Olympus while some other changes require a service request to the Cerner hosting provider.

There are two main types of printing with Cerner.

Local printing

Also commonly known as Citrix session local printing, this is one of the two widely used Cerner printing methods. The common set up looks like this:

• The Cerner Millennium instance is hosted remotely (either at a Cerner data center or with a third party hosting service)

• Exposure to users via Citrix servers.

• Users to login to Citrix using a workstation, which can be a dedicated computer, a shared machine or a Workstation On Wheels (WOW).

Here, the printers are installed on the workstation and are mapped to the Citrix server. When a user prints a document, the job is processed and routed back to the workstation as a PDF. From that point onwards, the print workflow is similar to printing a document saved on the workstation. The user then selects the correct printer from a list of locally installed printers and sends the job on its way.

Adding PaperCut provides secure release.

Here’s a typical PaperCut installation with Cerner.

Cerner backend printing

Here’s how PaperCut can be installed for backend printing