Print Solutions Magazine

Mount Sinai Hospital, a 462-bed health care center affiliated with the University of Toronto, wanted to save its increasingly busy medical staff time. The hospital, which uses a server from Citrix Systems Inc., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., wanted employees to be able to print documents to any available printer, regardless of its manufacturer.

“Medical staff have to travel around the hospital in order to do their jobs, and Mount Sinai needed to ensure that any printing of highly sensitive documents would be confined to the nearest available printer,” says Steve Noyes, the hospital’s director of Information and Communication Technology. Although the standard Citrix printing solution can be configured to print to any printer, Mount Sinai’s jobs automatically were sent to the default printer of the person who had logged on to a terminal. “Medical data could easily end up being printed in another part of the hospital,” Noyes says. “This was not an acceptable security risk, and had to be overcome.”

Mount Sinai also wanted to make printing more efficient for the increasing number of staff working from outside the hospital. Many employees complained that printing from the hospital’s databases over dial-up internet connections was slow. Also, the health care facility wanted to simplify complicated printer-management issues faced by the IT department. Hospital staff utilized 127 different printer drivers, and simply loading them all on the newly installed Citrix servers would be onerous. “We installed the first 20 printer drivers and said, ‘There has to be a better way,’” Noyes says. “It simply made no sense to continue working with so many different technologies, and the situation would only continue to worsen as manufacturers updated their printers.”

Mount Sinai began searching for a way to get all the printing functionality it required, one that could integrate with its Citrix environment and fit its budget. Noyes learned about a server-based solution called Ingenica’s UniPrint from Charon Systems, a Canadian reseller that had helped Mount Sinai install the hospital’s Citrix system. (Ingenica, based in Toronto, and Charon Systems, which is now called Bell Business Solutions, are part of Bell Canada.) Charon Systems explained to Noyes that UniPrint is designed specifically to integrate with Citrix MetaFrame or Microsoft Terminal Services environments.

UniPrint replaces multiple manufacturers’ printer drivers with a single Portable Document Format (PDF) generator that’s recognized by all printers, eliminating compatibility issues. As a result, users can print from any location to any available printer. UniPrint also simplifies printer management by eliminating the need to load separate printer drivers into the Citrix environment.

This effectively took care of two of Mount Sinai’s three concerns, but the facility still faced a problem. “Although UniPrint had the functionality to make it easy for Mount Sinai’s medical staff to print to any make of printer, it didn’t have the ability to ensure that a document would always print from the nearest available printer,” Noyes says. UniPrint was confident that it could add the capability. “I was impressed that Ingenica was prepared to work together with Mount Sinai to ensure that the solution would meet all the hospital’s printing requirements,” he says.

Working closely with Mount Sinai’s in-house IT staff, Ingenica spent several months developing functionality called Print Pal that would enable documents to always print from the nearest available printer. After successful testing, Mount Sinai was satisfied that the new solution would accelerate medical staff’s printing and eliminate the security risk associated with jobs printing in other parts of the hospital. The complete system was fully integrated in less than a week, Noyes says.

Because UniPrint’s PDF files are substantially smaller than ones in other formats, the new system reduced printer bandwidth utilization by up to 80 percent, Noyes says. This meant that even traditionally large files could be compressed to a size that did not dominate hospital bandwidth, hastening printing for hospital workers connecting to the database over dial-up connections. “A document that used to take me three minutes to print from a dial-up connection at home now only takes about 10 seconds,” he says.

UniPrint also has met Mount Sinai’s budgetary requirements, partly by significantly reducing help-desk calls associated with printer-compatibility issues. “The solution has been so problem-free, Mount Sinai has yet to call the Ingenica support staff,” Noyes says.

Noyes says UniPrint’s most important benefit is Mount Sinai’s staff can move throughout the hospital and know that all documents will print to the nearest available printer, regardless of the equipment’s manufacturer. Aside from being more convenient and faster than having to select a specific printer for every job, this also ensures that confidential information isn’t accidentally printed in another part of the facility.

“We’re trying to eliminate steps from the physicians’ computing processes, so that they can do what they need and then move on,” Noyes says. “Mount Sinai Hospital believes that technology should be utilized to make it easier for staff to better care for patients, and by providing the hospital with a cost-effective printing solution that makes it easier for medical staff to do their job, UniPrint has certainly helped the hospital’s IT department achieve that goal.”