A hospital treats a single episode. A clinic follows someone over time — antenatal care across nine months, a course of physiotherapy over twelve sessions, years of diabetes review. ClinicOS is built around that ongoing record, not just the appointment.
The modules a clinic runs that a hospital does not. Each one follows the national guideline it is built on, and everything below is derived from a small number of dates, so correcting one date corrects everything downstream.
The same clinical core, not a cut-down version of it. These are the modules our hospital product runs, unchanged.
One number, one person, for life. Allergies drawn first and in red, struck through rather than deleted. Duplicates merged rather than removed, combining both allergy lists.
Booked slots checked on the server, walk-ins given a token, and a waiting room ordered by when people actually arrived rather than by their appointment time.
Notes, vitals and prescriptions. A prescription matching a live allergy cannot be signed unless it is explicitly acknowledged, checked against the record at the moment of signing. A signed note is final; corrections are addenda.
Batches with expiry dates. Nothing expired leaves the shelf, stock goes out earliest-expiry-first, and Schedule H1 dispensing is written into a register with the prescriber and the patient.
Reference ranges that know the patient — a haemoglobin of 12.5 is low for a man and normal for a woman — and a critical value that blocks the report until the callback is logged.
The morning board: the waiting room in arrival order, who is due for recall, the lab worklist, pharmacy alerts and money outstanding — the same figures as the screens behind them, because they are produced by the same code. A card that cannot read its number says so rather than showing zero.
A week as a grid, because "is she in on Thursday" is a question you answer by looking rather than by reading a list of dates. Three states a day, not two: on, away, and nothing recorded — a hospital that has never filled the roster in must not have every day read as "off", or the board is a lie and everything it drives is noise.
Recorded once and read by the outpatient and theatre booking forms, from the same rule, so a consultant marked away cannot be quietly booked over. Nothing is refused: a hospital books over leave every week — leave is cancelled, a colleague covers, the patient is somebody's own — and software that refused would be overruled by writing the appointment on paper, leaving no record at all.
Overlapping leave for the same person merges: two rows for one absence read as somebody away twice, and deleting one leaves the other quietly warning. Leave that begins the day after another ends stays separate, because a conference and annual leave are two facts and one of them may need accounting for.
Between the sum insured on the card and the amount a hospital receives sit four separate reductions, and every one of them produces the argument at the discharge counter. This works the number out on admission instead: non-payable items first, then the proportionate deduction, then the co-payment, then whatever is left of the sum insured after earlier claims this year — each with the sentence that explains it, on a sheet meant to be printed and handed over.
Take a ₹10,000 room on a policy that allows ₹5,000 and the associated medical expenses are payable at half. It is the reduction nobody expects and the one that produces the largest shortfalls. IRDAI settled what it does not touch — medicines and consumables, implants and devices, diagnostics — and getting that wrong overcharges the patient in one direction and underpays the hospital in the other, so the exemption is written down rather than remembered.
Requests carry the diagnosis and the estimate, because one without them comes back queried and costs three days. A query can still be approved; a denial is final and a fresh request is raised instead, because reopening a denial loses the reason — which is the document an appeal is built on. Emergencies are marked as emergencies, and do not queue behind next Tuesday's elective.
PM-JAY and Aarogyasri do not pay a share of a bill — they pay a fixed rate for the procedure, and the hospital is paid that whatever its own bill came to. So none of the four reductions applies: no room-rent proportion, no co-payment, no sum insured running down. The beneficiary pays nothing: not the difference, not the non-payable items, not a co-payment. Balance billing a beneficiary is prohibited, and software that computed a patient share would be producing the exact demand the scheme forbids.
Where the bill exceeds the package, the difference is the hospital's. It is shown as its own figure on the estimate rather than folded into anybody's column, because it is what a hospital actually uses to decide whether to stay empanelled — and because the one place it must never appear is on the beneficiary's side of the sheet.
When a TPA settles less than it approved, that gap is a dispute with the payer, not automatically the patient's debt. It sits visibly as undecided until somebody with the authority writes it off, bills it, or appeals it — and the record says who decided and when. Claims needing an answer are listed by how long they have waited rather than by how much they are worth, because a small query about to lapse needs attention and a large claim submitted yesterday does not.
The counter opens on who owes money rather than on a search box. Consultations, dispensing and tests are billed from what was recorded, so nothing reaches a bill that is not already in the notes — and a test that was ordered and then stopped does not appear on one.
Clinical services are exempt and the software treats them that way. Medicine sold across the counter to somebody who is not admitted is an ordinary taxable sale at the drug's own rate. Every taxed line prints the reason beside it, so the person at the window can answer why without ringing anybody.
A concession comes off the charges and never off the tax, and it cannot be given without a reason — it is the one line on a bill nobody can account for later and the one most worth accounting for. A bill settles itself when the balance reaches zero.
The group, for a practice with more than one clinic: each one and the sum of them. A clinic that cannot be read is named rather than dropped from the total, because a partial figure presented as whole is worse than no figure.
Three tiers, so a receptionist can register a patient without being able to change a clinical record.
Grant a doctor once at the group and they reach every clinic, including the ones opened next year. No re-inviting anybody when the third branch joins.
Our support administrators, your administrators, and your desk and clinical staff scoped to what their job needs. Roles are data we can change, not code we have to deploy.
Hosted, backed up, monitored and updated by us. Certificates, upgrades and capacity are not on anybody's list at your end.
Your programmes, your schedules, your recall intervals. The system matches the clinic; the clinic does not rearrange itself around the system.
Structure, roles, schedules and branding. Configuration rather than a rewrite, which is why this takes weeks and not quarters.
Your existing register imported and reconciled with you — including the duplicates, which are merged deliberately rather than silently.
On your own address, with your staff trained on it, and us reachable when something is not obvious.
All of the above is in production: the patient register, the appointment book and queue, consultations with the allergy check enforced at signing, the pharmacy with expiry and the Schedule H1 register, the laboratory with patient-specific reference ranges and the critical-value callback log, and care programmes with derived staging and a recall list.
What it does not do yet, said plainly rather than left to be discovered after you have bought it. There is no patient-facing portal or app — patients get printed prescriptions and reports, not a login — no online payment (the counter records what was taken, it does not collect it), and no electronic claim submission — the desk, the estimate and the claim ledger are here, but a request still goes to the payer the way you send it today and the reply is typed back in. If you need any of them now, say so and we will tell you when they land rather than selling you a date.
It keeps working when the connection does not. Screens stay readable from the last known state, and anything that would write to a record refuses out loud rather than appearing to succeed — because a note that silently fails is a note somebody believes they wrote.