Hi Chris, Unfortunately, Internet Explorer provides very little in the ways of controlling printers for security reasons. You can imagine that should a browser be able to make adjustments to printer settings, you could find that simply navigating to a site could result in hundreds of pages being printed to all of your printers with you having no control. Internet Explorer therefore only allows you to call a print function which works the same as pressing the Print button. There are ways around this but they all rely on loading software such as ActiveX controls and the like onto your local machines as these are deemed as trusted and can interact with the printers directly. There are other options availabe within the hospital environment as we can get the application server to print directly to a network printer without using the browser to print at all, a feature called server-side printing however this obviously requires the server to have a direct network connection to the printers, something that cannot be achieved to GP practice printers. We are always making improvments to the system and with more GP clinical system links and interoperability with other 3rd party systems such as LabelTrace, things should hopefully improve in this area but at present the security limitations built-in to the browser prevents us from direct printer control. Please keep checking back and talk to your local lab team to keep appraised of any changes in this area. Paul Sparkes
Special Projects Manager
Anglia Healthcare Systems Ltd. |