By Healthcare Facilities Today

El Centro Regional Medical Center (ECRMC) is an acute-care medical center serving the healthcare needs of the Imperial Valley area of California, USA, since 1956. The hospital provides 165 patient beds in a state-of-the-art facility, including a new trauma center and rooftop heliport for superior trauma care. The ECRMC health network includes 100 physicians’ offices in the local area, with an average of five staff per office. 

ECRMC’s complex IT network includes 300 virtual desktops running on VMware VDI, 900 physical desktops, 100 thin clients, 150 physical servers, 150 virtual servers on Windows and Linux platforms, and many printer models.  Adding further complexity to its IT environment was the fact that approximately 95% of ECRMC’s total printing output revolved around remote printing of lab results in physicians’ offices. With hundreds of heterogeneous user devices and printers dispersed over many locations, it was impossible for the organization to standardize on any one printer type across the network.  

The biggest headache facing ECRMC was printer management - having to install a manufacturer printer driver for each and every printer that the center supported through VMware VDI.  

“It would have been a nightmare to try and figure out what you’re using as a printer in each case,” said Henry Felix, technical services manager at ECRMC. “And, it would have affected performance significantly because every different printer driver would have needed to be loaded at each log-in.”

To solve their complicated printer management issues, ECRMC chose UniPrint Infinity based on two primary factors: ease of management and deployment, and immediate ROI.  Negating the need to purchase tens-of-thousands of dollars’ worth of proxy server hardware, UniPrint provided ECRMC with a more cost-effective software-based printing solution that offered interoperability with the hardware they already had, and interfaced seamlessly with their VMware virtual servers. 

UniPrint’s universal printer driver replaced all manufacturer printer drivers within the ECRMC IT network, eliminating the need to install multiple printer drivers and solving compatibility issues.  UniPrint also enabled printing on any user device, to any printer across remote locations.  Furthermore, UniPrint’s PrintPAL utility allowed ECRMC to easily map printers based on location. 

“If we didn’t use UniPrint Infinity, the alternative would have been to support all printers and corresponding drivers inside of the virtual sessions, adding complexity, increasing overhead and negatively impacting performance,” said Felix. “The UniPrint driver works fabulously as a PDF printer running under Windows XP in a virtualized desktop environment. It makes our life a lot easier without having to manage printers inside of our virtual desktops or dealing with compatibility issues.  UniPrint Infinity works very well in keeping complexity to a minimum.” 

With UniPrint, ECRMC users who are logged into virtual desktops see a single printer option - which simply says “UniPrint.” It is easy and foolproof for physicians to print lab results through one virtual print queue and release their documents to the appropriate printer. For ECRMC’s IT team, UniPrint’s simplicity, flexibility and scalability was a dream come true. Local system administrators simply need to install a UniPrint Infinity client and a VMware View client to immediately begin printing from the new system.

Since deploying UniPrint Infinity, printing has become a simple and straightforward process for ECRMC’s IT administrators and users, regardless of user or printing device or location. Help desk calls for printing support have also dropped dramatically, to only 1-2 calls per week.

With hundreds of mixed computing devices on one network connecting from dispersed locations, UniPrint was able to give ECRMC a cost-effective printing solution to make printer management easier. UniPrint Infinity allowed ECRMC to better serve every possible user device and printer combination across the network, while integrating seamlessly with the medical center’s existing IT structure and VMware virtual servers and desktops.