Ask most healthcare administrators what printing costs their organization, and they'll point to paper, toner, and equipment leases. Those are the visible line items. But the real cost of an unmanaged print environment runs much deeper, and for most healthcare organizations, it's considerably higher than anyone realizes.
The average hospital spends around $3.8 million a year on printing — and those are only the dollars they know about. If they could trim that down by just 15%, that’s a $570,000 savings. So in this blog, we’ll explore obvious costs, not-so-obvious costs, and how to achieve significant savings without undermining patient care.
What Adds to Direct and Indirect Healthcare Print Costs?
Before diving into where costs hide, it's worth acknowledging something that generic print advice rarely does: healthcare printing is genuinely different!
Most industries print reports, invoices, and internal documents. Healthcare prints all of that — plus patient wristbands, medication labels, specimen identifiers, prescriptions, consent forms, discharge instructions, surgical checklists, lab results, imaging referrals, and medication administration records (MARs).
Many of these documents are generated continuously, around the clock, across multiple departments simultaneously.
A typical print audit might capture your multifunction devices and desktop printers — but it often misses the thermal printers running in the pharmacy, the label printers at nursing stations, the bedside printers in certain clinical units, and the high-volume printers churning through medical records.
These specialized devices represent real cost and real security exposure.
The data flowing through all of these devices is also uniquely sensitive. Protected health information (PHI) appears on documents that get printed, handed off, filed, stored, and sometimes left unclaimed in an output tray. The compliance stakes attached to that data — under HIPAA and related regulations — create a layer of financial exposure that simply doesn't exist in most other industries.
All of which means the hidden costs of healthcare printing aren't just bigger than in other sectors. They're different in kind.
Up to 50% of IT help desk calls in large organizations are printer-related. That’s fairly universal. Troubleshooting connectivity issues, managing driver updates, tracking down the right toner for a specialized label printer, unjamming devices across multiple floors and campuses — it all adds up to a significant and largely invisible drain that often falls on IT teams that in healthcare settings are already stretched thin.
In clinical settings, that burden has a direct operational cost. Time spent by nurses troubleshooting printer issues is time away from patient care. Delays in lab results or discharge paperwork slow patient turnover. When printing fails in healthcare, it rarely fails quietly.
Printers that aren't proactively maintained don't just underperform — they fail at the worst possible times. Emergency repairs, expedited supply orders, and unplanned device replacements all carry costs that don't appear in a print budget but absolutely show up in operational expenses.
Healthcare organizations tend to deprioritize device maintenance and modernization when time and budgets are tight. Legacy devices consume more energy, generate more service calls, and increasingly lack the security features that modern healthcare environments require. The longer they stay on the network, the more they cost — in ways that rarely get measured.
The financial consequences of a single regulatory compliance error can range from federal fines to breach notification costs to reputational damage that affects patient trust for years.
At the volume healthcare organizations print — shift handover reports generated every few hours, lab results distributed across departments, regulatory documentation printed and filed daily — any waste compounds quickly.
And the cost doesn't stop at the printer. Paper records in healthcare get filed, stored, and legally retained for years. The downstream storage cost of unchecked print volume is a real and often overlooked line item in healthcare operations budgets.
Printing delays can affect when a patient gets their test results or when they get discharged — which could mean that a bed isn’t available for someone who needs it. To be fair, there are hundreds of ways delays can happen. But repeated print issues shouldn’t be one of them.
Multiple types of devices spread across multiple sites are very difficult to manage effectively in-house. Even when all devices are managed well, it can take up quite a bit of time.
Some print cost reduction is straightforward and doesn't require a major program to implement.
Here’s a list of cost-saving do’s:
In an attempt to save money, some organizations are actually taking on more risk and long-term costs than they might realize.
Here are a few don’ts:
Cheap paper typically leads to more maintenance issues. Poorly-maintained printers have more paper jams and other issues, and older devices often use more energy and don’t have the security features that modern healthcare settings need.
Finally, just one breach can wipe out years of hard-won savings and carry HIPAA consequences that outlast any budget cycle.
Here are a few quick answers to some questions we hear often from healthcare organizations that haven’t worked with us before:
Not automatically — and this is one of the biggest misconceptions in healthcare print management!
A modern multifunction device from a reputable manufacturer should have the capability to support HIPAA-compliant workflows, but out of the box, most devices aren't configured to meet those requirements. HIPAA compliance is determined by how the printer is configured, managed, and secured.
At most healthcare settings, it’s usually the gap between how seriously healthcare organizations treat cybersecurity elsewhere and how little attention the print environment receives. Firewalls get monitored. Endpoints get patched. Access controls get audited. Printers — which are fully networked computers storing copies of sensitive documents — frequently get none of that treatment.
Within the print environment specifically, improper decommissioning is one of the most underestimated risks. When a printer leaves a healthcare facility with its hard drive intact and unwiped, every document it ever stored potentially leaves with it. Combined with default passwords that never get changed and firmware that hasn't been updated in years, the result is a category of device that sits inside a healthcare network largely unprotected — and largely unnoticed until something goes wrong.
Hospitals typically run a more diverse mix of print hardware than most industries. That includes multifunction devices (MFDs) for general administrative and clinical printing, high-volume production printers in medical records departments, thermal printers in pharmacies for prescription and medication labels, label printers at nursing stations for patient wristbands and specimen identification, and, in some settings, bedside printers for patient-facing documents like discharge instructions.
Yes, printers record more than most people assume! Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends entirely on whether your print environment is being managed properly.
It depends on your starting point! We’ve often been able to reduce print costs by up to 30% through a combination of fleet right-sizing, waste reduction, automated supply management, and lower IT overhead.
Tactical steps (like what we outlined earlier) definitely help, but they have limits. Without centralized visibility, consistent policy enforcement, and proactive maintenance across the entire fleet — including specialized devices — you can only get so far.
A quality managed print services provider that specializes in healthcare will address the problem systematically. We find that with fleet right-sizing, automated supply management, 24/7 device monitoring, and proactive maintenance, we can typically reduce total print costs by 15–20%. However, at one regional healthcare center, we were able to achieve a 38% fleet reduction in just the first year of our partnership, with a 50% reduction in service calls! It was a huge win for their entire company, and also for their staff who had been dealing with lots of equipment malfunctions and disruptions.
For healthcare organizations specifically, you should also be looking for a partner that brings HIPAA-aligned security practices, device hardening, encrypted print workflows, and secure decommissioning that protects PHI throughout the entire device lifecycle.
That's the standard we hold ourselves to. Every managed print engagement includes upfront device hardening, secure print release, proactive firmware management, and decommissioning data sanitization — not as add-ons, but built into how we operate by default. Our team can also manage specialized equipment like thermal and label printers, giving healthcare organizations a single accountable partner for their entire print environment. We've achieved a SOC 2 Type 2 report covering our managed print services as independent verification that our controls work.
For healthcare organizations that want to understand what their print environment is actually costing them, we also offer complimentary print assessments — including a full security analysis. Because you can't fix what you can't see, and in healthcare, what you can't see can hurt you.
We can also help you save more on devices and services! Click the link below to learn about the cooperative purchasing programs we work with!