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The Healthcare Industry

The On-Demand Print and Document Services Opportunity 

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.

Sales & Marketing Strategies

The key messages in selling to healthcare organizations are reduced cost of document management, enhanced control over the correct version of forms, easy document revisions, timely document distribution, improved information control, and secure document management and transmission. Healthcare organizations should remember to:

• Account for limited seasonal considerations. Your prime time to sell is anytime, but many decisions on outsourcing may come at the end of the fiscal year. This varies from organization to organization, so you will want to find out what financial calendar a prospect uses and emphasize getting commitments and contracts signed during the last quarter.   
• Call as a consumer/patient. Gather all the communications materials you can from a hospital or HMO so that you can better determine their needs and which applications can meet them.   
• Get a copy of a hospital or HMO directory. Since hospitals can have many departments and HMOs can be quite large, a directory will provide you with important contact names, titles, and phone numbers. (Ask for referrals, too.)   
• Make the Materials Management staff a priority. Once known as Purchasing, Materials Management makes major decisions regarding outsourcing a variety of services, including document production. In addition, ask Materials Management prospects for referrals to other departments.

Sales personnel must be able to clearly articulate the value proposition associated with electronic document management, storage, and distribution and print on demand. The key benefits that print providers should emphasize to customers in the healthcare industry include:

• The ability to electronically manage document storage and distribution in a rapidly changing environment   
• The ability to mange document flow with confidential patient information in a secure and private manner that complies with the newly-enacted HIPAA regulations   
• The ability to quickly and easily revise and update printed documents when necessary without inventory obsolescence   
• The ability to standardize work processes to realize greater cost efficiencies and return on investment   
• The ability to produce targeted and personalized materials that can be distributed to customers/patients/other healthcare professionals   
• The ability to produce time-critical materials in long runs for mass distribution or in short runs of customized pieces

The preceding excerpt was taken from CAP Ventures’ The Healthcare Industry: The On-Demand Print and Document Services Opportunity white paper. The complete white paper is available immediately. To learn more about the report or to make a purchase, please contact Alison Hipp at , ext. 126.