Healthcare organizations may always need to generate a significant amount of printed material. But the cost of all of that printed material frequently goes untracked. One study from 2018 found that a 1,500-bed hospital averages over 8 million printed pages each month, adding up to $3.8 million in costs every year. Once you factor in how paper costs have increased since then — over 19% — you can start to get a sense of how much printing supplies are currently costing the budget-strained healthcare system.
Of course, paper and ink costs are hardly the true cost of printing. You can calculate yours here or save this task for a Managed Print Services (MPS) provider.
Hidden Print Costs
A good MPS provider will start by conducting a thorough print assessment to see where your print dollars are really going and where hidden cybersecurity risks may lurk. It may sound simple — a basic cost per page. But printing devices are designed for a variety of different purposes, and that affects cost.
Here are hidden costs that MPS providers typically find:
- Printers designed for high-quality images are being used to produce black and white documents, which wastes precious color ink
- Wasteful default settings
- Ink-hogging fonts
- Aging devices that aren’t energy efficient and need frequent repairs
- Personal printers where they aren’t needed
- Using more devices than needed to accomplish an organization’s goals
- Lax printing policies
- Different supplies being ordered by multiple departments without proper oversight or expense tracking
- A massive burden on an internal IT team. At most companies, 40 – 60% of help desk calls are printer-related.
There are a lot of components that contribute to your overall print cost, and yet these are small potatoes compared to the biggest potential cost of all…
Cybersecurity Risks and HIPAA Violations - 5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself
Data breaches often come as a complete surprise, but if the answer to any of the following questions is either “yes” or “I don’t know,” your organization may be in danger of a HIPAA violation, a cybersecurity incident, and potentially both.
- Are any default admin passwords still active on your print devices?
- Are there any printers in your fleet that aren’t equipped with modern cybersecurity features?
- Are sensitive documents ever left in a printer tray for anyone to see?
- Do any of your printer hard drives still contain sensitive data when they’re decommissioned?
- Are any of your third-party providers cutting corners on cybersecurity?
It’s important that you can answer all of these questions with an emphatic no. If any of them gave you pause, then the cost of print supplies is nothing compared to a lawsuit and a lengthy remediation process.
A Recent Print-related HIPAA Nightmare
Just last year, HealthReach Community Health Centers left well over 100,000 patient names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, financial information, test results, insurance information, login credentials, security codes, and PINs on the hard drives of several printers slated for disposal, and their third party storage company didn’t dispose of them properly.
A class action lawsuit against HealthReach is already underway, and the organization is also on the hook for identity theft protection and credit monitoring services for one year for each patient affected…all because some of their printers weren’t decommissioned correctly. There aren’t any statistics about how often this happens. But just going by what I’ve seen, I’m guessing the numbers are alarmingly high.
The Benefits of Managed Print for Healthcare
One of the best parts about managed print is that it’s a service that helps pay for itself: a good managed print services provider can typically save you 30% on your print costs.
That said, not all MPS providers are the same. In addition to energy, print supplies, and repairs, and less tangible costs like IT time and workplace frustration, your provider may also be able to offer you the print security that healthcare organizations so desperately need. But that all depends on the provider.
Finding the Right Provider
At Marco, we have achieved a SOC 2 Type 2 report for both our managed IT and managed print services. That’s IT-speak for “a third party has verified we’re always following best practices for our clients.”
We also have a dedicated print security team that provides services you don’t typically find in standard Service Level Agreements (SLAs):
- Access to our dedicated print security team
- Secure passwords at setup that are unique to each client
- Multi-pass data overwrite of hard drives and NVRAM clearing
- A complimentary print security assessment
- Auxiliary uplift services
If you would like more help meeting compliance needs and mitigating your risk of a cybersecurity incident, Marco’s print experts are at the ready. Let us know how we can help!
