Hospital software is sold as a list of forty modules. In practice, value concentrates in four places, and the rest is administration. Buy for the four.
1. Registration and the OPD queue
This is where patients form their opinion of your hospital. Look for returning-patient lookup by phone number, appointment slots that prevent double booking, and a token display that reduces crowding at the counter. A registration that takes more than ninety seconds is a queue generator.
2. One shared patient record
The test of a real system is whether a patient is asked the same question twice. Registration, consultation, diagnostics, pharmacy and billing must read and write the same record. If lab results reach the doctor as a printed sheet carried by hand, the software is not doing its job.
3. Pharmacy and stock
- Batch and expiry tracking, with alerts before expiry rather than after
- Automatic stock reduction on dispensing, not a separate entry
- Substitute suggestions when an item is out of stock
- Reconciliation between pharmacy sales and billing, daily
4. Billing, insurance and TPA
Cash billing is easy. Claims are where money is lost. The system should track a claim from admission through submission to settlement, flag what is pending beyond a threshold, and show the gap between claimed and received. Hospitals without this routinely discover unclaimed amounts months later.