Assisting the Health Service to Upgrade their Systems
There has been a lot of press recently about the fact that three NHS trusts in England and Wales are still using Fax machines to send and receive inter-departmental information.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary (December 2025), said
“I’m happy to report that having gone away and scoured the NHS for evidence of fax machines being put to use, of the 205 NHS trusts we have in the country, only three are now using fax machines for everyday use, which are Leeds, Birmingham and Shrewsbury and Telford” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c801yyz3z5go)
It is good to see that the NHS is moving away from legacy technology, which must make it easier for support teams across the country to keep them working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but on the other hand, if technology works for a trust, why move away from it unnecessarily?
The other issue affecting health services globally is that a lot of equipment is still reliant on having a physical printer attached, causing issues where the move to electronic records on patient data and the need to sometimes share results with other practices, remote doctors and services means that these physical printouts need to be scanned in and then emailed. That is not too bad if you have a nice crisp A4 printout from a laser or inkjet printer attached to the equipment, but there is still a lot of equipment where it is attached to an old dot matrix printer (or even the results have to be written down by hand), where the quality may be poor, or the ink too light to scan properly, or the page bigger than the scanner!
So how have we assisted?
Ophthalmology
We have helped several ophthalmologists to capture the printouts from Zeiss Humphrey Automated Peripheral Visual Field Analyzers, such as HFA 720 & 740i models, to allow them to easily convert the test results to PDF and store them electronically with the rest of the patient’s information.
General Practice
Another instance was a doctor requesting help with a Windows 95 PC running a DOS based piece of technical software which originally printed to a HP inkjet printer via parallel port. The printer was now printing blank pages even with new ink cartridges. Replacing the machine itself would cost the NHS £20,000 – £25,000 but for around £200, the practice was able to replace it with a Retro-Printer and capture everything to an electronic PDF format, for storing with the patient records.
Hospitals
The amount of standard hospital equipment which is still reliant on old dot matrix printers is horrendous. It is often infuriating for the medical staff who have to cope with jammed printers, poor quality print-outs and then potentially transcribing the printed information into spread sheets by hand.
For one client, we supplied a Retro-Printer to capture the data from a Gamma Counter (Perkin Elmer 1470 Wizard from approx. 2002) and automatically convert it to CSV format.
Another client connected a Retro-Printer to a different radiation counter (Packard Cobra II Gamma Counter Model 5003),and a Room Pressure Monitor.
There are probably plenty more situations where the Retro-Printer can be used to help extend the life of old equipment still in use by the Medical industry – and save time wasted on dealing with old printers which are struggling to keep up with the work-load.
If you think the Retro-Printer may help improve your work-flow, then please do get in touch.
