Saber Healthcare Group consults with about 125 long-term nursing facilities plus a smaller number of assisted-living facilities and physical therapy services. We’re based just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, but you can find these facilities across the eastern United States.
Around 2014, Saber started growing through a string of new locations. Over the next six years our company increased roughly 600% in size. During that process, we basically just absorbed any IT infrastructure that was onsite. That was a lot for the IT team to handle—especially when it came to the print environment. We wound up with a mix of printers: Brother, Konica-Minolta, HP, a couple Ricoh and Xerox machines, you name it.
When I joined Saber’s IT department in 2018, my first task was a company-wide printer fleet inventory and standardization. I immediately recommended PrinterLogic based on my past experience. Not only was I confident that it would help standardize our print environment, I knew that it would work well with Citrix Virtual Apps and PointClickCare EMR software that Saber relies on.
Taking back control
Our medical staff is on the front lines taking care of patients. They need round-the-clock print capabilities, even when they change to a different building. But when you’ve got 130 buildings and hundreds of regional staff out moving in the field, you can imagine the economies of scale and place. The IT department used to get flooded with support tickets to get printers installed.
Once we rolled out PrinterLogic, those installation requests pretty much vanished. That’s because end users were now getting their printers automatically through location-based (IP) deployments. Or they’d use PrinterLogic’s self-service installation portal. My colleague Amy Sharo, who oversees Saber’s help desk, said it was a “ridiculous” weight off her shoulders.
Integrating and managing Chromebooks
In 2019, we started issuing Chromebooks to our physical therapists. That was great from a computing standpoint, but it led to us having to manage Chromebooks separately in the Google Cloud Print console. It was like adding an extra print environment when we were trying to streamline everything.
Then Google dropped the news that Cloud Print was end-of-life. So we had to look for a replacement—but ideally one without the same management headaches.
PrinterLogic SaaS ended up being the only solution we needed. It has a Chrome OS Client Extension that lets us manage Chromebooks just like any other endpoint. And we can do it all from one window with the PrinterLogic Admin Console. It also made things easier in terms of ease of setup, flexibility and cost savings, because it’s a zero-footprint cloud solution that we can quickly extend to any location.
Better yet, we migrated from PrinterLogic Web Stack to PrinterLogic SaaS in one day.
Adding value and security
At Saber, we take protected health information (PHI) very seriously. Our staff is trained to safeguard sensitive patient information through measures like secure release printing, which requires print jobs to be authenticated. The thing is, with most printing solutions, secure release printing can be awkward for end users. Furthermore, it can be a huge hassle for admins to implement.
PrinterLogic SaaS allowed us to test drive a native Control Panel Application for Konica-Minolta devices. Instead of having to swipe a badge, users can authenticate their print jobs by just entering their PIN code on the printer’s embedded touchscreen. In the long run, that’s going to make it much easier for us at Saber to be compliant with PHI and HIPAA regulations.
A solution for healthcare printing—and much more
It’s pretty remarkable to think of how many problems we eliminated with just one solution.
If you look at just the print-related benefits alone, we succeeded in cutting help desk tickets by something like 75%. And we found a superior replacement to Google Cloud Print for Chromebook printing.
From a resource perspective, however, PrinterLogic has really lowered a lot of our overhead—from infrastructure to personnel. It helped us get everything under the same umbrella, and any future sites we add will be much easier to integrate. PrinterLogic simply lifts a lot of the day-to-day burden off the IT department, and it gives our end users more power, more convenience and more security.
Taken together, all those advantages have been huge.