Printed output still has a place in modern healthcare organizations. Even when discharge instructions can be provided on mobile devices and prescriptions can be electronically transferred to the patient’s pharmacy of choice, there are times when print output is preferred by patients or when certain output may not be electronically transmitted.

This presents an opportunity for healthcare leaders to develop an output management strategy that helps healthcare professionals to efficiently and securely produce the right documents in the right format on the right devices.

Yet a surprising number of healthcare leaders I met at HIMSS this year — including CIOs — have not yet focused on this issue.

Developing an output management strategy makes good business sense for healthcare leaders. It helps protect sensitive patient information by limiting access to printed documents to the healthcare professional who submitted the print order — both by authenticating the user before a document is sent to the print queue, and through ID verification at the printer itself when the user is ready and present for printing. This helps maintain compliance with regulatory requirements while keeping information from falling into the wrong hands — and that’s critical in an era when an individual’s medical information is worth 10 to 20 times more on the black market than his or her credit card number.¹

An output management strategy can also help protect the organization by creating an audit trail of which healthcare professionals are printing sensitive documents within the facility. It can reroute critical output when a particular device is down. And it can give an organization a better view of what documents are being printed and how often they are being printed — as well as the associated print costs.

So where should healthcare leaders begin? Here are three key starting points:

Conduct a security assessment. Review printed outputs from every device in the enterprise — from wristbands to reports to prescriptions. Create a checklist to address HIPAA security and privacy requirements for printed output. By comparing the appropriate regulations to the organization’s real-world printing activities, gaps can be identified in print output compliance before they become a violation or reach the point of a full-blown crisis.