Communicare forgets the printers. Again.
Someone opens up, starts the day, and the printer settings that worked yesterday are gone — or the job goes to the wrong printer entirely. It lands at the worst possible moment: scripts, referrals and paperwork queue up behind it while patients are already waiting, or while an outreach vehicle is being loaded with the day's paperwork.
Across the Communicare sites we support, this was generating around ten calls a week. Not a one-off fault to be diagnosed once and closed — a recurring interruption that reception had learned to work around and nobody had actually fixed.
We built Print365 and the calls stopped
Print365 is a small desktop application that runs on clinic workstations. When a clinician sits down at a computer, it asks them which printer they want and sets Communicare's printer selection for them — once, deliberately, at the start of the session. Rather than finding out the printer is missing or wrong halfway through a consult, the choice is made before it matters.
It is running across ten sites and the morning printing calls stopped at all ten.
Ten calls a week is also only the visible fraction. Reception works around a recurring fault for months before anyone logs a ticket, so the number that reaches a helpdesk consistently understates how much disruption is actually happening.
Print365 is included for organisations on Biz365 managed services rather than sold separately. It exists because we kept seeing the same fault and would rather build the fix than keep billing for the callout.
Telstra Health supports the app. We support what it runs on.
We don't support Communicare. It is a Telstra Health product and for anything inside the clinical software they are the right people to call. What we do is everything underneath it — servers, networks, connectivity, workstations, backup and printing — for the organisations running it.
That distinction matters when something breaks, because the honest answer to “who do I ring?” depends on which layer has failed, and most providers are vague about it. We would rather be clear: if it is in the application, it is Telstra Health. If it is anything the application depends on, it is us.
Most of this work is a long way from Perth
A metropolitan practice with a printing fault can wait until the afternoon for a technician. A clinic several hundred kilometres from the nearest town cannot, and a morning of no scripts and no referrals is a morning of care that doesn't happen.
We work across the Pilbara, Kimberley, Goldfields and Mid West as well as Perth, and we run satellite and failover connectivity for remote clinics across those regions. Supporting a site you can't drive to is a different discipline, and it is the one we've spent the most time on.
Communicare printing, answered.
Including the two answers that are a flat no. You'd find out on the call anyway.