In the first week of October, LRS once again attended the Cerner Health Conference (CHC) to meet with our Cerner associates and thousands of their closest friends. As usual, there were around 14,000 attendees at the event, and it seems like most stopped by the LRS booth (yes, my feet still hurt). Everyone from Nurses to Chief Information Officers came by to learn more about Enterprise Output Management, share their stories of printing woes, and learn how LRS software can address their toughest printing challenges.
As in past years, there were a few clients who came by and described a particularly vexing print problem, which we were able to duplicate right there on the demo system in our booth. After recreating an issue, we then showed the customer one or more ways to solve it. Working long hours in a trade show booth can be rough, but being able to help people resolve real-world problems makes it all worthwhile.
Many questions revolved around Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) print management, which is addressed by LRS’ Virtual Session Printer Agent (VSPA) software. Another hot topic was how to make business decisions based on document contents or meta data contained in a print job. For example, some people asked about detecting whether a document was a prescription (Rx) and automatically sending it to either to a secure / locked tray or routing it to a software solution such as Troy® Secure Print Enterprise®. Conversely, whenever a non-Rx job was being sent to a locked tray, clients wanted to be able to detect that error in advance and then re-route the document to the default tray. It’s simple enough when you have the right tools.
If there was one common thread in the booth visitor conversations, it was this: printing encompasses all aspects of an organization, and there is a trend towards establishing “one throat to choke” for organizations. Long gone are the days where it was acceptable to have many silos for various units inside of an organization supporting numerous “best of breed” solutions. There is now a shift towards single, cohesive, unified solutions. That applies to EMR software as well as the output management solution you choose to handle all of your organization’s documents. Printing can be complicated and having a central print management facility eliminates a lot of finger-pointing when issues arise. Faster problem resolution likewise leads to better patient care.
Much like Cerner’s vision of everything being built on a unified platform, LRS healthcare offerings are built upon the tried and true infrastructure of the VPSX solution. Interestingly, Cerner and LRS were both established in the same year… 1979. We’ve been passionate about output management for as long as Cerner has been passionate about healthcare, and we’re both going strong.
Here’s looking forward to a great 40th anniversary for both companies and some exciting announcements at next year’s CHC 2019!