Lasting impressions: distributed printing helps southern IDN streamline process and save...

Today's businesses are becoming increasingly separated geographically, but connected technologically. With this trend comes the challenge of aligning technology between locations, and connecting people, workflows and assets within those locations. One important element of successfully connecting

Methodist Healthcare incorporates eight hospitals, several rural health clinics and a home health agency with approximately 10,000 associates and 1,805 licensed beds. A healthcare organization of this size produces an enormous amount of documents that need to reach many touch points throughout the organization. Schedules, internal memos, patient invoices and service explanations are just a few of the more than 2 million impressions printed and copied at Methodist each month.

The Memphis, Tenn.-based integrated healthcare delivery system ultimately looked to Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. to overcome its document output and delivery challenges.

Enabling Distributed Printing

Most of Methodist's printing is handled at its data center, which prints approximately 1.5 million pages per month, including customized forms and invoices. The healthcare system had the required speed and volume with the laser printing systems it used at the time, but there were several limitations with the technology.

The machines were physically connected to a mainframe via a proprietary cable, restricting placement of the equipment to the data center itself. This channel-attached design rendered Methodist unable to use the printers for non-mainframe printing, resulting in underutilization and increased cost of operation. This centralized process also was riddled with hidden costs. For instance, Methodist's internal courier makes its last delivery at 6 p.m. If a print job is not completed by that time, the data center must hire an outside courier to make the delivery. If the print job is misrouted--most commonly because of low quality or hard-to-find routing information on a document--costs can be immeasurable.

Methodist wanted to decentralize its printing by using a distributed print process. With distribute-and-print, a print job could be sent from the data center to any printer on Methodist's network, putting the printing power where people needed it. Methodist chose Konica Minolta and replaced its two machines with four FORCE 75 Production Printing Systems, nearly doubling its print capacity while saving $750,000 in replacement capital costs over the original printers. In addition, Methodist would benefit from lower costs per page, reduced maintenance, and reduced strain on floor space and cooling resources by upgrading to the smaller, more efficient printers. They would be allocated across the Methodist organization, with two in the Methodist University Data Center and two in the Patient Financial Services Department, nine miles east of the data center.

Methodist needed to restructure a proprietary Metacode data stream that only communicated with the existing printers. The solution required an intensive process to move a channel-attached connection to an Ethernet-based connection and then convert the data stream to an open industry standard language such as PCL or PostScript. Many IT departments have been handcuffed by this proprietary format, but are hesitant to invest the internal resources that it takes to re-code each Metacode report.

Konica Minolta's Professional Services Group was brought in to address the conversion and recommended using Barr Enterprise Print Server, an application developed by alliance partner, Barr Systems, to move the data from the channel attachment on the mainframe over to Methodist's LAIN. Once moved, the data is converted from the proprietary data stream by a common language transformation application. With the conversion completed, the channel-connected printing process was replaced with printing via the IP network, allowing data to be transmitted over Methodist's LAIN to any of the printers on Methodist's network.

Advanced Forms Processing

Once the distributed printing system was enabled, Methodist would undertake a secondary process improvement initiative. The majority of the printing done at the data center is forms-based printing of patient invoices and records from applications such as its SAP Enterprise Resource Planning software. Fonts, layout data and the form itself for approximately 100 different forms were stored on Methodist's old machines. Most of the forms only had very minor differences, but because of the enormous amount of time required to make changes, a separate form was necessary each time a small modification was required--an enormous strain on time and network resources, especially since only two staff members were trained to make the changes.

Konica Minolta's engineers integrated software applications from Barr Systems, Prism Software and Objectif Lune to complete the data conversion to a modern forms-creation process with a leading-edge WYSIWYG interface. This combination of applications seamlessly pulls ASCII LCDS data from the mainframe, converts the data to an industry-compatible print format, inserts it into an electronic form and outputs the file to the printer.

Methodist's data center now uses 40 forms--a 60 percent reduction-each of which can be easily modified through the advanced graphical interfaces in the Objective Lune software. The Objective Lune application provides synergy between common forms and helped to acquire reduced forms management, revision control and deployment. New forms, reports and maintenance can be accomplished in a matter of hours or days instead of weeks or months.

The new process also brought a significant hardware benefit to Methodist. The original system used two servers per printer to enable the additional step of converting ASCII LCDS data to Metacode. There is now only one print server for every two printers, providing further processing power and printing redundancy.

Tangible, Intangible Savings

Methodist has saved time and reduced errors. The misrouting of reports has been reduced by 50 percent due to the ability to print clear banners on the top of each page--a task not available without electronic forms. This new banner capability also provides a job number for each print job, expediting the reprint process by allowing users to simply find the print job number in the print queue and print out copies on demand.

Many hard costs savings have also resulted. The enhanced banner page identification process has saved approximately two employee hours per night in the data center. The increased speed gained by both the faster printer engine speed and faster system processing contributed to savings in courier costs to deliver the print jobs. Total savings came to approximately $50,000 annually, considering average employee compensation and courier costs.

The strain on Methodist's network has also been significantly reduced. By transitioning file conversion to the Prism Software application, the output print data file size was reduced by 67 percent from the previous method, therefore reducing the volume of data being transferred over the LAN. Moreover, the distributed printing scenario provides fail-over capabilities should a data center experience a loss of power. This strategic advantage aligns the printing procedure with Methodist's long-term "high-availability" strategy and disaster recovery procedures.

Expanded Disaster Recovery

In its efforts to achieve 100 percent uptime of its systems, this spring Methodist brought online a second data center in another of its facilities. This addition will ultimately provide Methodist with greater flexibility and disaster recovery capabilities for its entire network. With patient record regulations and the costs of downtime being extreme--each minute of downtime is estimated to cost a facility of Methodist's size more than $l,000--keeping up to date on disaster recovery techniques is paramount to the organization. Supplementing this overall disaster recovery strategy are two FORCE 85 Production Printing Systems in the new data center. With these new printers, any one of the three servers in any location can print to any of the six printers on the network.

SOURCES

Dennis Gross Director of Telecommunications and IT

Andy Fowler CIO

Methodist Healthcare Memphis, Tenn.

PRODUCT/COMPANY FORCE 75 Production Printing System Konica Minolta Business

Solutions U.S.A. Inc. I Ramsey, N.J.

www.kmbs.konicaminolta.us