What hospital software should cost a 30-bed hospital in a taluka town

Ask the owner of a 30-bed hospital in Parbhani, Nanded or Latur what software they use and the answer is usually a billing program on one computer, a register for OPD tokens, and a WhatsApp group with the lab. Everything else is memory and paper.

They have usually been quoted for hospital software before. The quote was for a system built for a 300-bed corporate hospital, with modules they will never use, an implementation fee that costs more than a month of revenue, and a laptop on every desk that they do not have.

What a small hospital actually needs

Strip the corporate feature list down to what happens every day in a small hospital and you are left with a short list.

• OPD: a token when the patient arrives, a queue the receptionist can see, the doctor’s note and prescription.
• Pharmacy: sell against the prescription, track stock and expiry.
• Lab: take the order, enter the result, send the report to the patient on WhatsApp.
• Billing: OPD, IPD and pharmacy bills with GST, and a daily collection report for the owner.
• IPD: admissions, a bed board, nursing notes, a discharge summary.
• Staff roles: the owner decides who sees what.

Everything else is nice to have. If the software does these six things on a phone, the hospital will use it.

What it should cost

Our view: a small monthly subscription in the low thousands of rupees, no large implementation fee, and setup in a day. The hospital should be able to stop at any time and take its data with it.

That is possible because the software runs on phones and the computers the hospital already has, on a shared cloud server, with onboarding done by the hospital’s own staff rather than a visiting engineer.

Going live in a day

1. We create the hospital’s login and the owner’s account.
2. The owner adds doctors and staff with their roles from a phone.
3. OPD starts that afternoon with tokens and prescriptions. Pharmacy and lab follow in the same week once stock and test lists are entered.
4. Billing is switched on when the staff are comfortable, so the old billing computer can be retired.

Patient booking without a WhatsApp Business account

Many clinics have no Meta business page or WhatsApp Business account, and getting one verified takes weeks. We solve this by running one platform WhatsApp number that every onboarded hospital shares for bookings and queue updates. The patient messages the number, picks the hospital and doctor, and gets a token. The clinic sets up nothing.

If you own or run a small hospital, we will show you the system on a free link with your doctors’ names on it.