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Hospital management software
evaluation checklist.

75 questions to put to any HMIS vendor, grouped by the department that will live with the answer. Written to be used in a meeting, not read once — print it, strike what does not apply to your hospital, and take the rest with you.

In short

This is a buyer's document, not a product specification. Nothing below describes what Polynexus HMIS does. Every question is one a hospital in India should be able to put to any vendor — including us — and get a specific answer to.

No vendor will answer yes to all 75, and you should be wary of one who does. A clear no with a workaround is more useful than a yes that turns into a change request after signature.

Method

How to use it

Four passes, in this order. Most of the value is in the first one, which happens before you speak to anybody.

  • Mark it up internally first. Go through the list with your own department heads and mark each question critical, useful or not applicable. A hospital without a blood bank or a theatre can strike whole sections. This pass also tells you what your hospital actually needs, which is worth having independently of any vendor.
  • Send the critical questions in writing. Before the demo, so the answers are on record and comparable across vendors. Written answers are also where vague claims become specific ones.
  • Use the rest in the demo, as "show me". Ask the vendor to perform the step rather than describe it. The questions in sections 3 to 9 are written to be demonstrable.
  • Score by weighted area, not by counting yes answers. The areas are not equally important to you, and a raw count rewards breadth over fit. There is a worked weighting in how to choose hospital management software in India.

Questions are numbered continuously from 1 to 75 so you can refer to one by number in an email thread with a vendor without quoting it in full.

Prints as a plain document — navigation, styling and calls to action are stripped out. Choose "Save as PDF" in the print dialogue if you want a file to circulate.

The checklist

75 questions, by area

Each area opens with why it is worth questioning at all — usually because it is where hospitals discover the gap after they have signed.

1. Patient registration and records

Everything downstream keys off the patient record. Duplicates created here surface months later as split histories and unreconcilable bills.

  1. How does the system prevent duplicate patient records when someone returns without their registration number, and can two records be merged after the fact without losing history?
  2. Can a patient be registered and treated before their identity documents are available, as happens in an emergency?
  3. Is there a single patient timeline that shows visits, admissions, investigations, prescriptions and bills together, and who is allowed to see it?

2. Appointments and scheduling

Scheduling is where a hospital either controls its own capacity or lets the queue control it.

  1. Are appointment slots generated from each doctor’s actual schedule, and what happens to existing bookings when a doctor takes leave?
  2. Can the system hold a waitlist and confirm a patient automatically when a slot frees up?
  3. How are walk-ins handled alongside booked appointments in the same queue?

3. OPD and consultation

If the consultation screen is slow or awkward, clinicians work around it on paper and the record stops reflecting what happened.

  1. How many screens and clicks does a routine consultation take from opening the patient to closing the note?
  2. Can a doctor raise investigation orders and a prescription from within the consultation, or do those require separate modules?
  3. Is a draft clinical note distinguishable from a finalised one, and can a finalised note be amended — with what audit trail?

4. IPD, wards and beds

Bed occupancy is the number management asks for most often and the one most likely to come from a whiteboard.

  1. Is bed occupancy derived from actual bed allocations, and is it accurate at the moment you look at it?
  2. How are ward transfers handled, and does a transfer require approval?
  3. What does discharge do — does it release the bed, close the billing and produce the summary as one action or three?

5. Clinical workflows: nursing, emergency, ICU and theatre

These are the areas most often demonstrated as screens and least often used in practice. Ask how they are filled in during a shift.

  1. Are nursing notes, medication administration and intake/output recorded in the system during the shift, or entered afterwards from paper?
  2. How does an emergency case get admitted without re-registering the patient from scratch?
  3. Does ICU carry its own records — daily progress notes, ventilator logs — or is it treated as a ward with a different name?
  4. For the operation theatre: can you schedule a procedure, run a pre-operative checklist, record the anaesthesia and operative notes, and capture consumables and implants against that procedure?

6. Laboratory and radiology

The failure mode here is a provisional result reaching a patient as a final one.

  1. Do lab and radiology orders arrive from the consultation, or are they re-entered at the collection counter?
  2. Is there an explicit verification step before a result is released, and who is authorised to perform it?
  3. Can samples be tracked from collection to result, and can you report turnaround time by test?

7. Pharmacy

Pharmacy is where stock value, patient safety and billing accuracy meet.

  1. Is dispensing done against the prescription raised in the consultation, or re-keyed at the counter?
  2. Are batch and expiry tracked at the point of dispensing, and can you report on stock nearing expiry?
  3. Does the system flag low stock against a reorder level you set, per item and per location?
  4. How are returns, substitutions and partial dispensing handled, and do they correct the bill?

8. Billing, tariffs and packages

A bill assembled from memory is a bill that leaks. This is usually the strongest financial argument for changing systems.

  1. Is the bill assembled from the clinical record — consultation, investigations, pharmacy, bed charges, procedures — or entered separately?
  2. Can you maintain more than one tariff (cash, corporate, scheme, TPA) and have the correct one applied automatically?
  3. How are package rates handled when a patient’s actual usage exceeds or falls short of the package?

9. Insurance and TPA

The delay between discharge and payment is usually a process problem, not a payer problem.

  1. Can pre-authorisation requests be raised, tracked and linked to the admission they belong to?
  2. How are claim documents assembled — from the records already in the system, or collected manually?
  3. How are short settlements, deductions and rejections recorded against the original bill?

10. Inventory and purchasing

The non-pharmacy side of stock is routinely left out of scope and then becomes a spreadsheet again.

  1. Are non-pharmacy consumables and assets tracked, and at what level — item, category, location?
  2. Can purchase orders be raised in the system, and are goods received against them?
  3. Do stock movements between departments leave a record, and can you reconcile physical stock against system stock?

11. Reporting and MIS

Ask for the numbers you already chase monthly. If the demo cannot produce them, nothing else on this list matters much.

  1. Take the three reports your management asks for most often — can the vendor produce them live during the demo, from the same data the clinical modules write?
  2. Which reports are standard, which are configurable by you, and which require a vendor change request?
  3. Is there a daily operational summary that is produced automatically rather than compiled by someone each morning?

12. Roles, permissions and audit

Permissions are the difference between a system a hospital can be audited on and one it cannot.

  1. Can roles be defined so that a ward nurse, a billing clerk and a consultant genuinely see different systems?
  2. Which actions are written to an audit log, how long is it retained, and can we read it ourselves without asking the vendor?
  3. What happens to a user’s access on the day they leave, and who can trigger that?

13. Security and patient data protection

Hospital records are among the most sensitive categories the DPDP Act 2023 recognises, and the hospital remains accountable for them.

  1. Is patient data encrypted in transit and at rest, and are identifiers encrypted at the field level or only the disk?
  2. How does the system support DPDP Act 2023 obligations — access, correction and erasure requests, grievance handling, and consent records?
  3. What is the vendor’s process if they suffer a breach: who is told, how quickly, and what is committed in writing?
  4. Which certifications does the vendor actually hold, issued by whom, and valid until when? Ask for the certificate, not the claim.

14. Hosting, backups and continuity

The question is not whether the system will be unavailable, but what happens when it is.

  1. How often are backups taken, where are they stored, and when was a restore last tested?
  2. What is the stated recovery time and recovery point objective, and is it in the contract or only in conversation?
  3. What can the hospital still do during an outage — is there any offline or degraded mode for registration and billing?

15. Deployment model

Cloud and on-premise commit you to different costs, different responsibilities and different failure modes.

  1. Is the product available both as a shared cloud service and as a dedicated or self-hosted instance, and does the feature set differ between them?
  2. For on-premise: what hardware is required, who maintains it, and who is responsible for patching it?
  3. For cloud: is the instance shared with other hospitals, and how is your data isolated from theirs?
  4. If you run more than one unit, can a user work across units without a second login, and can each unit be reported on separately and together?

16. Data migration

Migration scope is the single most common source of implementation overrun and dispute.

  1. Which data is migrated — patient master, visit history, outstanding bills, stock positions, masters — and which is deliberately left behind?
  2. Who performs the mapping and cleansing, and is that effort inside the quoted price?
  3. How is migrated data verified before go-live, and who signs it off?
  4. What happens to records that cannot be migrated cleanly — are they archived somewhere you can still reach them?

17. Implementation

Ask who does the work, not how long it takes. A short timeline usually means a narrow scope.

  1. What is the proposed sequence of modules and departments, and why that order for our hospital?
  2. Who configures the masters — wards, beds, doctors, slot templates, services, tariffs, test and medicine masters — and how long is that expected to take?
  3. Is a period of parallel running included on billing and stock, and who decides when it ends?
  4. Who is the single named person accountable for the implementation, and does that person change at go-live?

18. Training and adoption

Software that staff cannot use under time pressure is not in production, whatever the go-live date says.

  1. Is training delivered by role rather than as one session for everybody?
  2. How are new joiners trained after go-live, and is that included or chargeable?
  3. Is there documentation or in-product guidance our staff can consult without raising a ticket?

19. Support

Support terms are negotiated once and relied on daily for years.

  1. What are the support hours, and what is covered outside them — a hospital does not stop at 6pm?
  2. What are the response and resolution commitments by severity, and what counts as severity one?
  3. How are enhancement requests handled, what is chargeable, and how are upgrades scheduled and tested?

20. Integrations and APIs

Most hospitals need the new system to coexist with something old for longer than they expect.

  1. Is there a documented API we or a third party could build against, and is access to it included?
  2. Can the system run alongside an existing HIS during transition, bringing visit and billing records across?
  3. What is supported for lab analysers, imaging equipment, payment devices and telephony, and what is each one’s cost and lead time?
  4. Who owns the integration if it breaks after an upgrade on either side?

21. Data ownership and exit

Negotiate the exit at the start, when you still have leverage. This is the section vendors most often answer vaguely.

  1. Who owns the data — the hospital or the vendor — and is that stated explicitly in the contract?
  2. In what format can we export the complete dataset, including documents and attachments, and how long does a full export take?
  3. What happens to our data if we terminate, if the vendor is acquired, or if the vendor ceases trading? For on-premise, is source code escrow available?
  4. Is there a renewal price cap, or can the subscription be repriced at will once we depend on it?

22. ABDM and interoperability

This is the area where unqualified claims are most common and hardest for a buyer to verify.

  1. Is the vendor ABDM-certified, empanelled, or building toward it — and which specific milestone have they reached? Treat these as three different answers.
  2. Can they demonstrate an ABHA link actually happening, rather than describing the workflow?
  3. What does the system do when a patient refuses consent, or withdraws it after records have been shared?
  4. If the ABDM specification changes, who carries the cost of the rework — the vendor or the hospital?

An important distinction

What to evaluate is not the same as what any one vendor supports

The list above is deliberately larger than any single product. It includes questions about blood banks, operation theatres, TPA workflows, analyser interfacing, ABDM certification and source code escrow — and no vendor, ourselves included, will answer all of them the way you would ideally like.

That is the point. The checklist tells you what to ask; it does not tell you what to accept. Which answers are acceptable depends on your hospital, and that is a decision only you can make. If you want our answers to these questions, ask for them directly — including the ones where the answer is no, or not yet. Where our own ABDM work stands, for example, is written out in full on our ABDM and ABHA integration page, including what has not been done.

Sources

Where to verify the regulatory questions

For the sections on data protection and ABDM, go to the authority rather than to a vendor's summary of it — including ours.

Method: this checklist was compiled from the operational areas a hospital management system has to cover end to end, and from the points at which implementations are most often disputed — scope, migration, reporting and exit. It is maintained by the Polynexus engineering team and is not sponsored by, endorsed by or affiliated with any authority named above.

FAQ

Using the checklist — common questions

How do we use this checklist in a vendor evaluation?
Do not send all of it to every vendor. Work through it once internally first and mark each question as critical, useful or not applicable to your hospital — a 40-bed nursing home without a blood bank can strike whole sections. Send the critical questions in writing before the demo so the answers are on record, and keep the rest for the demo itself, where you ask the vendor to show rather than tell. Questions are numbered continuously so you can refer to them by number in a vendor thread.
How many of these questions should a vendor be able to answer?
Every question in the areas you marked critical, and "no" is an acceptable answer to many of them. A vendor who says a module does not do something, and explains the workaround, is giving you information you can plan around. A vendor who answers every question with an unqualified yes is telling you less, not more. The answers to watch are the ones that change under follow-up questioning.
Which questions matter most for a smaller hospital?
Registration, OPD, billing, pharmacy and reporting carry most of the daily load in a smaller hospital, and the commercial sections — data ownership, migration, implementation, support — matter regardless of size because they decide what happens when something goes wrong. Blood bank, operation theatre, ICU and TPA sections can be skipped or deferred if those departments do not exist yet, but ask how they would be added later rather than dropping them entirely.
How should we score the answers?
Weight by area rather than counting yes answers, because the areas are not equally important to you and a raw count rewards breadth over fit. Our guide to choosing hospital management software in India sets out a worked weighting — workflow fit, clinical usability, billing and payer handling, reporting, implementation and support, commercial terms, interoperability — that you can adapt to your own priorities.
Should we ask every vendor about ABDM?
Ask, but ask precisely. The useful question is not "are you ABDM ready" — it is whether the vendor is certified, empanelled, or building toward it, since those are three different positions with different timelines and different risks to you. Ask to see an ABHA link actually happen, ask what the system does when consent is refused or withdrawn, and ask who carries the cost when the specification changes. Treat any unqualified claim of certification as something to verify with the National Health Authority rather than accept.

Put these questions to us

Send us the sections you marked critical and we will answer them in writing before any demo — including the ones where the answer is no. We would rather be ruled out early than be the wrong fit for two years.

See Polynexus HMIS

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