Hospital / Clinic

For a hospital, nursing home, clinic or polyclinic. Outpatients register, take a token, are consulted and billed; a prescription and investigations follow. A hospital that admits runs the inpatient half too: beds, admission charges, transfers, discharge and, where needed, cashless insurance claims. A dispensary sells through the pharmacy counter.

Set up before your first patient

An hour with these steps, in this order, saves a week of fixing bills later. The owner (or an Office login) does all of them.

1. Pick what you run Settings > Hospital > Features. Start with what you do today: an OPD-only clinic leaves Inpatients (IPD) off. Every switch can be turned on later without losing anything, and each one adds its own screens, reports and permissions.
2. Add departments Setup > Departments & Wards, Departments tab, with the consultation rate each one charges.
3. Add your doctors under Records > Doctors with their specialisation and consultation fee. A visit's fee comes from the doctor first, then the department.
4. Lay out wards and beds (IPD only) on the Wards & Beds tab, with the charge per day for each ward. Admission offers only free beds, so a ward with no beds admits nobody.
5. Build your price list in Setup > Items & Services: procedures, consumables and medicines. Lab tests go on the Lab Templates tab (with Laboratory on), each with its charge and result parameters.
6. Fill the small lists on the Vocabulary tab that your screens pick from: dose frequency and route, TPA / insurers, referral sources, consultation rooms, OT rooms.
7. Create a login for each person by the job they do (see Who signs in). A doctor's login must be linked to their doctor record so their queue shows their own patients.
8. Run one test patient end to end: register, book, check in, consult, write an Rx, bill, print the OPD slip. Cancel the test visit afterwards rather than deleting it.

How the work flows

A patient passes through several desks. Each step says who does it and what prints. The OPD steps run in every hospital; the steps marked IPD appear only when Inpatients is on.

The whole journey on one page:

flowchart TD
    A[Register Patient
UHID · name · DOB · gender · phone] --> P[(Patient record)]
    P --> B[Book Visit
doctor · department · date · fee]
    B --> T[(Visit booked · token issued)]
    T --> TV[Token Display on TV]
    T --> D[OPD Desk: arrive · vitals]
    D --> V[(Vitals recorded)]
    D --> E[Consult: diagnosis · notes]
    E --> F[Consultation bill]
    F --> S[(Sale voucher)]
    E --> Rx[Write prescription]
    Rx --> RX[(Prescription and its medicines)]
    RX -->|dispense| PC[Pharmacy Counter sale]
    E --> Lab[Order investigations]
    Lab --> LO[(The lab order)] --> LR[Result entry] --> LRR[(Results recorded)]
    E -->|admit| AD[Admit Patient
ward · free bed · charge/day]
    AD --> ADM[(The stay)]
    ADM --> CH[Daily charges · procedures · bed days]
    CH --> AC[(Charges waiting to be billed)]
    ADM --> BT[Bed transfer] --> BTT[(Bed move recorded)]
    ADM --> CL[Insurance pre-auth · settlement]
    CL --> IC[(The claim)]
    AC --> DIS[Discharge: bill unbilled charges
less advances · summary]
    DIS --> S

Who signs in

Give every person their own login; never share the owner's. Adding a user in a hospital asks what the person does first. That choice decides the screen they open on, their phone's bottom bar and the switches they start with. Any switch can be changed afterwards.

1. Open the user form Setup > Users & Permissions > Add.
2. Pick the seat (Doctor, Nurse, Reception...). For a Doctor, link their doctor record.
3. Set the login: user name and password. The person can set a PIN on their own device for quick unlock at a shared desk.
4. Review the switches the seat ticked, add or remove any, and save. The person gets the change at their next sign-in.

Hiring follows the same rule: an Office seat may create any clinical seat, a Doctor may take on a Nurse, and no other clinical seat hires anybody. Reset to role defaults puts an existing person back on the standard set; it warns first, because it discards anything set by hand. The full switch list is in What each person may do, and the rules shared by every trade are in Users, Roles & Permissions.

Whose patients

A doctor seat is scoped to its own patients, which is why that seat alone is tied to a doctor record in the directory. It is enforced where the data is, not just hidden in the app, so a consultant holding every switch in the group still opens their own queue rather than the hospital’s.

Where it is in the app

On a desktop the menus run across the top bar:

On a phone or tablet the side menu starts with My Work (the screen you sign in to, and the Dashboard), then Patients & OPD (Patients, OPD Queue, Casualty, Token Display), Inpatients (Bed Board, Active Admissions, Medication Round, Housekeeping, Discharge History, Claims), Clinical Services (Prescriptions, Investigations, Imaging, OT, Pharmacy Counter, Blood Bank), Office (Reports, Birth & Death Register, Ambulance, Directory, Complaints, Accounting, Audit Trail), Setup (Masters, Items & Services, Settings, Users and the shared masters) and the quick actions.

The bottom bar depends on the seat:

Each entry appears only when its feature switch is on and the person holds a switch for it (see What each person may do); a menu or group with nothing left in it is not shown. Red counts show work waiting for the person who can act on it: patients waiting, results owed (lab seats), claims to chase, discharge summaries to write, and prescriptions, OT cases, blood requests, ambulance calls and imaging studies still open. On a desktop the Token Display is Open Token Display (TV / Monitor) in the OPD Desk’s actions menu. The billing desk opens on Patient Dues.

Screens

OPD Desk

The live queue for the day: waiting, in consultation, done. Check a patient in, record vitals, bill the consultation, write the prescription and print the OPD slip, all from the row. Filters by doctor and department; the strip over the desk counts the whole day, not just the rows on screen.

Token Display (TV)

A full-screen board for the waiting area showing the token now being seen per doctor. Open it from the OPD Desk: Open Token Display (TV / Monitor) in the desk’s actions menu, shown when OPD Token Display (TV) is on and the person holds Run the Token Display. Run it on an Android TV or a second monitor.

Casualty

Today’s arrivals and what became of them, beside the OPD Desk. Shown when Inpatients (IPD) is on.

Inpatients (IPD)

Bed Board (wards, beds, who is in which, free beds), Active Admissions (running stays with unbilled charges and advances), Discharge History, and Insurance Claims. Admission offers only free beds; the per-day charge defaults from the ward and is snapshotted on the stay so a later ward repricing never moves it. See Inpatients and Insurance Claims.

• Housekeeping - the beds waiting to be turned over, beside the Bed Board they come from.
• Medication Round - the doses due on the ward in the next two hours, signed off as given, missed, refused or held. Needs Administer Medication (MAR) to sign.
• Blood Bank - bags in stock, cross-match, issue and the transfusion on a stay. Needs the Blood Bank switch (which needs IPD). External banks a bag came from are listed under Hospital Masters > Vocabulary > Blood Bank Source.

Clinical Care

• Prescriptions (Rx) - the queue of written prescriptions and their dispensing state. The editor picks frequency, timing and route from the hospital's own vocabularies (masters), and works out the quantity from doses per day x duration.
• Investigations - lab orders from ordered to collected to reported, with result entry against a test template. See Laboratory.
• Imaging - the modality worklist: X-ray, scan and ECG orders from request to report. Needs Radiology & Imaging; works without IPD. Machines are listed under Hospital Masters > Vocabulary > Imaging Modality.
• Operation Theatre - the OT schedule: book, start, write up, postpone or cancel a surgery. Needs Operation Theatre (OT). Theatres are the OT Room vocabulary.

Office screens

• Birth & Death Register - the statutory registers, one tab each.
• Ambulance - the trip board: log, dispatch, complete and charge a run by distance. Needs the Ambulance switch. Vans are listed under Hospital Masters > Vocabulary > Ambulance Vehicle.
• Audit Trail - who did what, and when, across every patient. Full-access logins only.

Pharmacy Counter

The ordinary counter sale, with batch and expiry on for medicines; a dispensed prescription pre-fills the lines. Shown when the pharmacy module is on and sales are enabled. See Pharmacy.

Directory

Patients are party ledgers (contact type patient) so they get a statement, receivables and dues like any customer. Doctors are a contact type of their own with a specialisation; consultations and commission report per doctor. Staff and Suppliers are the shared lists.

Hospital Masters, Items & Services

Hospital Masters (under Management, needs Manage Hospital Masters) has five tabs: Departments, Wards & Beds (only when Inpatients is on), Lab Templates (only when Laboratory is on), Rx Protocols and Vocabulary. Vocabulary holds the small lists other screens pick from, grouped Clinical (diagnosis with ICD-10, dose frequency / timing / route, dosage form, oxygen device, body part, allergen), Ward (transfer reason, ward class, packages, OT room, mortuary chamber), Lab (sample type, lab section, lab method), Front desk (TPA / insurer, corporate panel, referral source, guardian relation, consultation room) and Services (Imaging Modality, Blood Bank Source, Ambulance Vehicle, each shown only when its feature is on). Items & Services is the product master for procedures, consumables and medicines.

The patient’s bill

flowchart TD
    A[Patient arrives] --> B{Outpatient or admitted?}
    B -->|OPD| C[Consultation · investigations · medicines]
    B -->|IPD| D[Bed days · procedures · consumables · doctor visits]
    C --> E[Billed at the visit]
    D --> F[Charges accumulate unbilled on the stay]
    F --> G{Cashless insurance?}
    G -->|yes| H[TPA approves an amount]
    G -->|no| I[Patient pays in full]
    H --> J[Discharge bill split:
TPA share · co-pay and deductible]
    I --> K[Discharge bill · advances adjusted]
    J & K --> L[Balance due]
    L --> M[Patient Dues · TPA receivable]
    E --> M

Settings

What each person may do

Twenty-one switches, on the Hospital group of a user’s permissions, each shown only where its half of the hospital is switched on. Eighteen are write switches and are off for a view-only login; See Clinical Notes, See Patient Billing and Run the Token Display are read switches, so they survive view mode.

Several are split because they are two different people: ordering an investigation and reporting it, writing a prescription and dispensing it, posting a ward charge and reading what it came to, discharging a patient and reopening that discharge. On a small clinic one person may hold both halves — that is a choice you make, not one made for you.

Reports

Forty-three hospital reports, under three headings in the Reports menu, named after the question being asked. Which of them a person is offered depends on two things together: whether the half of the hospital it is about is switched on — no inpatients, no census; no laboratory, no turnaround sheet; no OT, no theatre list — and whether that person may read it (the money reports need See Patient Billing; the doctor-wise sheets are hidden by Single Doctor). A heading a seat has no report under does not appear.

So a doctor sees their own clinical sheets, a lab technician the investigation ones, a pharmacist the counter’s, a billing desk the money, and office all forty-three. Every one exports to PDF and Excel — and when a report is not offered, its export goes with it, so a figure withheld on screen cannot walk out in a file.

Troubleshooting