Every vendor says their hospital management system is “complete”. This checklist lists, department by department, the modules and capabilities a hospital should actually expect, so you can compare vendors on the same terms.
Use it in three passes: tick what your hospital needs now, mark what you will need within two years, and ask each vendor to show (not describe) every item you ticked.
Front desk and OPD
- Patient registration with a unique registration number or UHID, and an ABHA field
- Full demographics: guardian, age in years, months and days, address, district and PIN code
- Department and doctor assignment, with doctors filtered by department
- Revisits against the existing record, and referral details
- Exempt or free patient categories that fee totals handle automatically
- Printable OPD slip on an ordinary printer
- Token queue per department and room, operator console and waiting-hall displays
Wards and clinical services
- IPD admission opened from the OPD record, without re-typing
- Diagnosis, referring doctor and procedures such as operations
- Discharge with outcomes: discharged, death, LAMA
- Casualty or critical care admissions, including brought-dead records
- Bed and ward management, nursing notes and OT scheduling (common in private hospitals)
Diagnostics
- Lab registration linked to the patient, with bill and lab numbers
- Test catalogue by department, with test codes and normal ranges
- Structured result entry for biochemistry, haematology (CBC), urine, stool, serology and culture
- Printable reports and online report lookup for patients
- Radiology reports with investigation and film usage; cardiology records
Pharmacy and stores
- Supplier master with GST details
- Purchases with batch number, manufacturing and expiry dates, MRP and rate
- Batch-level stock, supply from central store to department stores
- Medicine issue to patients and patient medicine history
- Expired-medicine and consumption reports
- A separate general store for non-medical supplies, issued against indents
Blood bank
- Donor and donation records with bag and segment numbers
- Component-wise stock with an opening balance
- Automatic expiry by component (whole blood, PRBC, platelets, FFP)
- Issue register with patient, component and issue type
Records, compliance and ABDM
- Medical record room: scanned case sheets, injury, death and X-ray records with ICD codes
- ABDM M1: ABHA creation, verification, login and Scan & Share
- ABDM M2: care contexts and consent-based sharing of FHIR records as a Health Information Provider
- HPR and HFR registry integration
- Role-based access with separate add, view, edit and delete permissions
Finance
- OPD and IPD billing, deposits and refunds
- Insurance, TPA and government scheme claims
- Accounts integration
Government hospitals often need little of this, while private hospitals usually need all of it. Decide early, because billing touches almost every department.
Administration and support
- Department-wise, date-wise and user-wise reports that print as registers
- Staff attendance, ideally recorded without extra devices
- A helpdesk where staff raise and track support tickets
- Dashboards for hospital management
Must-have or nice-to-have?
| Priority | Typical modules | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Start here | Registration, OPD queue, reports | Creates the patient record everything else uses |
| Next | Laboratory, pharmacy and stores | Highest daily volume after registration |
| Then | IPD, casualty, blood bank, record room | Where lost entries have clinical and legal consequences |
| As needed | Billing, OT, attendance, apps | Depends on the hospital’s funding model and size |
How Swastik HMS maps to this checklist
Swastik HMS modules cover the front desk and OPD queue, IPD and casualty, pathology, radiology and cardiology, central drug store, medicine stores and general store, blood bank, record room, ABDM (M1 and M2), reports, staff attendance and a helpdesk. Modules such as patient billing, bed management or OT scheduling can be added through custom development on the same patient record.
Want to walk through this checklist with us? Request a demo and we will show each module live.