The healthcare services market prints more than 100 billion pages per year and represents a sizeable market opportunity for digital service providers.

Key Applications in the Healthcare Industry

The most common types of documents produced by the healthcare industry are forms (1,500 to 5,000 run lengths); manuals and directories; medical booklets and brochures; newsletters, bulletins, and flyers; patient-specific materials; billing statements, payroll, and claims; and mailroom and business correspondence products. 

Forms represent the largest print opportunity within the healthcare industry. Forms are essential tools in the day-to-day operations of the healthcare industry. They are used to capture and communicate critical patient information. They shadow a patient throughout his/her hospital stay, from admitting, to charting a patient’s status, to releasing the patient from the hospital, to complying with insurance and governmental requirements and regulations. The accuracy and clarity of forms is essential as life-critical information is captured, and litigation implications may result if forms are not easily understood.

Forms production has experienced a dramatic shift during the past few years, migrating from an offset printing to a print-on-demand application. It is estimated that forms printed on demand can save, on average, 25% - 45% of the total costs incurred using offset. The ability to create, revise, update, order, input, distribute, and print forms electronically offers the healthcare industry significant cost and productivity improvement opportunities.

Patient-specific materials represent another important document type in the healthcare profession, and an area where personalization and variable data printing are being incorporated into documents with growing frequency.

Regulatory compliance documents, although increasingly stored and transmitted electronically, constitute a significant share of the document workflow within the healthcare field. With regular updates mandated by changing governmental regulations, these documents lend themselves to electronic storage and print on demand.

Training is an integral component in the healthcare industry as employees and healthcare professionals regularly attend continuing education courses to keep apprised of new developments in the healthcare field. Course materials and training handbooks are ideally suited to print on demand, enabling production of materials as they are needed and ensuring timely and accurate content.