By Aarogentix · · 7 min read
A hospital management system touches every department, so the wrong choice is expensive to undo: staff retraining, data migration and months of double entry. Use this list in every vendor meeting and write the answers down. A vendor who answers clearly and in writing is usually one you can work with later.
1. Does it cover your real daily workflow?
Ask the vendor to run one patient end to end on your own scenario: registration, consultation, prescription, lab order, pharmacy dispensing, billing and discharge. If any step needs a separate tool, a spreadsheet or a re-typed number, that is where errors and leakage will happen.
2. Is billing built for India?
- GST invoices with the right tax treatment for the services you sell
- Package and deposit handling for admissions, plus interim and final bills
- Part payments, refunds and credit notes with a clear audit trail
- Corporate, TPA and insurance billing if you treat those patients
- Receipts and invoices in a format your accountant accepts
3. Can it help with NABH?
If you are accredited or planning to be, ask which registers and records the software produces by itself: incident reports, medication errors, infection surveillance, patient feedback and quality indicators. Software cannot make a hospital compliant, but it can stop your quality team from rebuilding the same registers by hand every month. See how NABH compliance software is organised for an example.
4. Who owns the data, and can you leave?
Get two answers in writing. First, that the hospital owns its data. Second, how you export everything (patients, visits, invoices, lab results) in a standard format if you stop using the product. A vendor that is vague here is telling you something.
5. How is patient data protected?
- Role-based access, so a receptionist cannot open clinical notes
- A log of who viewed or changed a patient record
- Separation between hospitals sharing the same platform
- Backups: how often, where they are kept, and whether a restore has ever been tested
- A clear process for reporting a data incident to you
India now has the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. As the hospital you are the one responsible for patient data, so choose a vendor who treats security as a shared job. Our own summary is on the data protection page.
6. Will your staff actually use it?
Software that is slow or cluttered gets bypassed with paper. Have the person who will use it most (front desk, pharmacist, lab technician) try the demo themselves, not watch the vendor click. Count the clicks for the three things they do two hundred times a day.
7. Does it work when your internet is bad?
Ask what happens when the connection drops for ten minutes in the middle of an OPD session. Browser-based software needs a stable link; find out whether the vendor has a plan for it and how you would keep billing during an outage.
8. What does support really look like?
- Hours of support and the channel (phone, chat, email)
- Whether support understands hospital workflow or only the software
- Who trains your staff at go-live and how long that takes
- What happens after a bad day: is there a person you can call
9. What is the full cost?
Compare the total for three years, not the headline price. Ask about set-up and data migration, training, extra users or beds, extra branches, add-on modules, SMS or WhatsApp charges, and price changes at renewal. Published plans make this easier: ours are on the pricing page.
10. Can you start small?
A free trial with your own data is worth more than any demo. Run a week of real OPD through it before you sign. If the vendor insists on a long contract before you have used the product, treat that as a warning.
11. Will it grow with you?
More beds, a second branch, a new department such as maternity or dialysis. Ask whether adding these is a setting, a paid module or a new project.
12. Can you talk to a similar hospital?
Ask for a reference of about your size and type. A nursing home and a 200-bed multispecialty hospital need different things from the same product.
A simple way to decide
- Shortlist two or three vendors using the questions above.
- Run each through the same one-day scenario with your own staff.
- Score workflow fit, billing, data and support from 1 to 5.
- Compare three-year cost, then decide.
Want to see how Aarogentix handles these twelve points? Start the free 14-day trial and test it with your own OPD.