Infirmary Health Saves $240,000 with Managed Print Solution from Konica Minolta

Infirmary Health System, Inc.
Mobile Infirmary Circle
Mobile, AL
http://www.infirmaryhealth.org/

INDUSTRY: Healthcare
CUSTOMER GOAL: Provide the highest quality print solutions throughout multiple hospitals and clinics while standardizing on a print management solution to help easy management and reduce overall print costs.

PRODUCTS AND SOLUTIONS:

Konica Minolta Optimized Print Services (OPS)
bizhub® SECURE
bizhub 25 Black & White Multifunction Printer
bizhub 223 Black & White Multifunction Printer
bizhub 363 Black & White Multifunction Printer
bizhub 423 Black & White Multifunction Printer
bizhub 552 Black & White Multifunction Printer
bizhub C364 Color Multifunction Printer
bizhub C454 Color Multifunction Printer
bizhub C654 Color Multifunction Printer
bizhub PRESS 1200 Black & White Production Print System

BACKGROUND: Looking ahead to the long-term changes in healthcare reimbursements from government and private payers, Infirmary Health System, a leading provider of healthcare in southwest Alabama that serves an 11-county region along the Gulf Coast, intensified its efforts to reduce its operating budget and drive costs out of the system. With printing costs escalating and an aging printer fleet, the Infirmary Health CIO saw an opportunity to reduce printing costs by moving to a managed print solutions model for the entire organization.

Operating four acute care hospitals, two rehabilitation hospitals, three outpatient facilities and more than 30 medical clinics, Infirmary Health’s printing environment was not optimized for efficiency and was comprised of multiple printer vendors, contracts and support agreements. Recent acquisitions at Infirmary Health meant that the IT department inherited multiple different IT systems, printers and support agreements. As a result, supporting the fragmented printer fleet was costly.

The goals of the managed print project included:

Provide high quality, reliable printing throughout all Infirmary Health’s hospitals and clinics;
Reduce the overall printing budget;
Standardize on one vendor for support and ordering of supplies;
Free up IT staff to concentrate on other business objectives;
Transition from an in-house print support model to a vendor support model; and
Improve print efficiencies by ensuring that users are printing to the most appropriate devices.

LONG-TERM MFP PARTNERSHIP: For the past 15 years Infirmary Health has worked with the same Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. (Konica Minolta) representative and service technician for its copiers, multifunction printers (MFPs) and production print systems. In the past three years, the IT department replaced all the copiers in the main hospital with networked bizhub MFPs, which meet ISO 15408 and EAL 3 certification, offer

user audit-trail reporting, and enhance Infirmary Health’s HIPAA compliance efforts. A portion of the MFPs also include bizhub SECURE for advanced security features such as hard disk drive (HDD) encryption, HDD lock password protection and automatic data deletion helping comply with protected health information (PHI) regulations. In addition, all the bizhubs easily print documents from Infirmary Health’s electronic health record system from Epic.

In fact, the IT department was so pleased with the bizhub MFPs, Konica Minolta service technician and having one single point of contact, that it also replaced the print systems located in the data center with multiple bizhub PRESS Production Print Systems. The added redundancy in the data center provides maximum uptime and ensures that all high volume print jobs are printed quickly and efficiently.

MANAGED PRINT SOLUTION: Infirmary Health identified four potential managed print partners including Konica Minolta’s Optimized Print Services (OPS) and began evaluating services to identify cost savings and support options. The IT department quickly narrowed it down to Konica Minolta who offered measurable savings and had local support technicians who were already familiar with Infirmary Health.

Konica Minolta’s OPS consultants worked with Infirmary Health and identified over 1,800 individual and desktop printers across the entire organization. Precise total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis was done to benchmark against average market costs. Infirmary Health estimated it would save $20,000 monthly or $240,000 yearly on replacement toner cartridges by moving to OPS for the ordering and delivery of all consumables, replacement parts and maintenance kits, regardless of the device make or model.

Infirmary Health implemented the managed print strategy in phases, starting with the main hospital and then expanding to its other hospital facilities and eventually to its satellite facilities or clinics. In each case, OPS replaced printers with network printers and moved each device under OPS management. Today, OPS monitors all printers and handles the ordering of supplies and the purchasing of replacement of printers.

With a total of 2000 printing devices throughout the organization, Infirmary Health has moved to a vendor supported model with a dedicated Konica Minolta technician on site to service and ensure optimal up- time. Now when IT receives a call related to printing, it is sent directly to the Konica Minolta technician. As a result the CIO has been able to reduce the need for an in-house printer technician and free up exist- ing IT staff time to focus on high priority projects.

To ensure that hospital staff have access to continuous printing, the IT team maintains a small number of older MFPs and printers which they can swap out with any device that needs servicing by a local Konica Minolta technician. Working with the dedicated Konica Minolta technician, local technicians are available within 12 to 24 hours of a service call and help maintain all the print devices located through- out the nine different hospital facilities and more than 30 satellite clinics.

With the managed print solution completely implemented, the CIO is able to show pure cost savings of $240,000. The success of the program allowed the CIO to extend the OPS contract to include right sizing the entire printing fleet to further reduce cost savings. Over the next year, Infirmary Health plans to eliminate individual printers and route print jobs to more appropriate network MFPs or the data center. This will ensure that both high and low volume print jobs are printed securely and cost efficiently.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS: “Maintaining our large printing fleet across multiple hospitals and clinics was a strain on the IT department and our operational budget. It made more sense to move to a single managed print service plan with Konica Minolta OPS maintaining and supporting our entire fleet regardless of the manufacture and model. Not only has it helped to drive down operating costs, but the IT department no longer has to manage multiple vendors or service devices ourselves. With everything else I have on my plate as CIO of a large healthcare provider, printing is now one less thing I have to worry about with Konica Minolta OPS.”