Lexmark Proving Its Chops in Health Care

Lexmark  International announced Feb. 25 software and services updates for its Lexmark Clinical Assistant MFP to enable health care offices to reduce their multifunction printer fleet management costs and improve productivity.

The announcement was made at the 2008 Annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference & Exhibition held Feb. 24-28 in Orlando, Fla., where Lexmark demonstrated document capture solutions that help health care facilities automatically scan documents into EMR (electronic medical records) management systems and integrate easily with a hospital's existing IT infrastructures.

The Lexmark Clinical Assistant is a Lexmark X646dte monochrome laser MFP, which Lexmark preloads with configurable health care-specific applications intended to simplify clinical workflow processes. (According to Lexmark, the applications can be provided on larger workgroup devices as well.) 

Software includes Lexmark's new Documents on Demand software suite, which offers forms on demand, printing form handheld devices and a new version of Lexmark Queue & View. 

According to Lexmark, using the Lexmark Clinical Assistant smart MFP can help reduce clinicians' time with forms by preparing and automatically filling in forms and adding bar-code IDs.

"By pulling information from databases and printing forms on demand, we can turn what used to take 20 minutes of clinician time getting forms ready to ship into a single button click," said Ken Woodruff, industry director for health care at Lexmark.

"Less time spent at the device [and] more accurate routing of paper documents like fax orders to the pharmacy and the like deliver real savings of productivity, even though most organizations do not measure these savings appropriately," said Don Dixon, research director of printing markets, technology and service provider research at Gartner. "Lexmark has done such a good job verticalizing these application-based solutions—and frankly is ahead of its competitors in terms of time to market and the number of solutions.

"Their next move is to take them to the broader horizontal markets for greater leverage." "Of all the output providers, including Canon, Ricoh, Sharp and HP,” he said, “I think that Lexmark has the most thoughtful and comprehensive set of solutions catering to paper-based business processes in both the nursing station in hospitals and in doctor offices."