HIS, HIMS, HMS and hospital ERP: what the terms actually mean

Anyone shopping for hospital software meets four acronyms in the first hour: HIS, HIMS, HMS and hospital ERP. Vendors use them interchangeably, tender documents use them inconsistently, and a buyer is left unsure whether they are comparing three different products or the same product three times.

Mostly it is the same product three times. But there is one real dividing line underneath the vocabulary, and it is worth knowing which side of it a quote sits on.

HIS — hospital information system

The oldest of the four and the broadest. A hospital information system is anything that holds the hospital's information: patients, visits, orders, results, bills. Used strictly, HIS software leans clinical — the patient's route through the hospital and the record it produces.

Used loosely, which is most of the time, it means whatever the vendor sells.

HIMS — hospital information management system

HIMS adds one word, and the word is the point. Management implies that the system does not only store the information but runs the processes around it — queues, requisitions, stock, approvals, the daily numbers a director reads. In practice HIMS is what most Indian vendors mean when they say HIS, and the features of the TechMediz HIMS page is written against that broader reading.

HMS software — hospital management system

HMS software and hospital management system are the everyday spoken forms. They are what hospital staff type into a search box, and they mean the same thing as HIMS in all but the most formal usage. Nobody has ever lost a tender for calling it the wrong one.

Medical ERP and healthcare ERP

ERP borrows the word from manufacturing, where it means one system covering purchasing, stores, production and accounts. Applied to a hospital, medical ERP software or healthcare ERP means the business side is in the same system as the clinical side: purchase orders, supplier bills, stock movement, pharmacy sales, receipts and the day's collection.

That is the real dividing line, and it is the only one worth interrogating. Not what the product is called — whether the money and the medicine share one record. A hospital running clinical software with accounts in a separate package has two versions of what a patient cost, and the reconciliation between them is somebody's evening.

So which are you shopping for?

• If you want the patient's clinical route covered — registration, OP, IP, theatre, laboratory, radiology, records — you are shopping for a HIS or HIMS.
• If you also want purchase, stores, pharmacy stock and accounts in the same record, you are shopping for a hospital ERP, whatever the brochure calls it.
• If a vendor offers both as separate products, ask what synchronises them and how often. That answer is the product.

TechMediz is sold as one system covering both halves. The clinical route is on the hospital management software page and the back office on the hospital ERP software page — two pages because they answer different questions, one system because a patient and their bill are the same fact.

The questions that cut through the vocabulary

• Is there one patient number used by every module, or one per module?
• Does a pharmacy sale reduce stock and post to accounts in the same action?
• Can management see today's collection without anyone compiling it?
• When you add a department next year, is it a module or a second system?

Four honest answers to those tell you more than any acronym on the cover page. If you are further along and working out what a system costs, what decides the price covers that separately.