It’s hard to be a printer and typewriter company in 2018. But IBM spinoff Lexmark has found that many areas — including healthcare — still have a need for its services.

“As much as we want to go paperless, there are organizations and processes that unfortunately are still rooted in paper,” Marty DeGraff, Lexmark’s industry director for government, education, and healthcare. “Which is good for us, but people are trying to move away from that as fast as they can, and so we kind of bridge that digital transformation between the hard copy worlds and the electronic space.”

At HIMSS18, Lexmark will be highlighting its healthcare offerings around three key areas: nursing stations, patient admitting and business operations. The company will also be announcing several new offerings.

“One is prescription printing,” DeGraff said. “So this is a fully compliant CMS solution. We utilize a pantograph on the back for some of the security features so if somebody were to copy the prescription itself, the document would show this was void or this was a copied version of this prescription. We have anti-erase features on there as well as all of the requirements for CMS, so we have the security warning box as well as microprint wrapped around the border of all of the boxes. If prescriptions do need to be printed, this saves money for healthcare providers so they don’t need to order the prescription pads or specific scripts in stock, as well as helps prevent theft because unfortunately healthcare is a big target for theft as well as data breaches.”

Lexmark will also be showing off new apps that enable hospital staff to print and scan from their mobile devices, while still maintaining the necessary privacy and security of patient information.

DeGraff said that there are still reasons in healthcare to use paper, and when they come up it’s important to be able to address them efficiently.

“There’s so many generations of people that need to be supported that some people may never want to see another piece of paper again, but if you’re looking at the potential older generations, they want that information and they want to be able to take it home and read it. So as applications go mobile or in the cloud we need to keep up with the ability to serve not only our healthcare customers but their customers and their needs and desires as well.”

Lexmark’s booth will also feature another relic: a pinball machine. 

“Printing is a bit of a retro fad, if you will, so the thing that we chose was more retro,” DeGraff said. “We went with a pinball theme because we feel that our customers often get bonked around and there’s pitfalls that they have to avoid while they’re trying to achieve some of these high scores.”

Lexmark is in Booth 4232.