What a hospital information management system is
A hospital information management system is where a hospital records what it knows — who the patient is, what was done for them, what was ordered, what was dispensed and what was billed. The word that matters is information. A billing package or a pharmacy program serves one department's screen; a HIMS exists so that each department can read what the others wrote.
In practice that comes down to one patient identity. TechMediz allocates a Unique Patient Identification Number (UHID) at registration, and every visit, admission, requisition, result, prescription and bill afterwards is stored against it. Staff search on UHID, mobile number or name, so a returning patient's record is found rather than created a second time.
HIMS, HIS, HMS and hospital management software are used almost interchangeably, and the differences are set out in what HIS, HIMS, HMS and hospital ERP actually mean. This page is about the information itself. For the department-by-department view of the same system, see hospital management software.
What TechMediz HIMS holds
Patient information
Demographic details, the UHID, visit and diagnosis details, and new and returning patient statistics — captured once at patient registration.
Clinical workflows
Doctor-wise check-in, prescriptions and diagnosis, earlier visits and patient history in the consulting room; treatment, surgery and procedure details on admission; diagnosis requests and sample collection at the nurse station.
Administrative workflows
Ward and room availability, room transfer and allocation, theatre availability and occupancy, the physical location of each patient file, and two-level approval for return bills and discounts.
Billing
OP billing at the counter, the in-patient advance and running bill, pharmacy billing and insurance tracking, all posted against the same patient. See hospital billing software.
Pharmacy
Prescriptions from OP and ward requests from IP arrive at the pharmacy as orders. Rack management, stock adjustment and medicine search by pharmacology or combination sit alongside them.
Laboratory and radiology
Test creation, sample collection, result entry, re-test status and turnaround time in the laboratory; report templates, doctor allocation, scan status and PDF upload from external scan software in radiology.
Electronic medical records
Everything clinical above, read back as one history for the patient. How that record is built is covered on the EMR software page.
Reports
Patient, doctor, accounts, store, laboratory and radiology reports, and a report of cancelled, edited and discounted bills — drawn from the data the hospital already runs on. See MIS reports.
How information moves between departments
A HIMS earns its keep at the handover. A laboratory requisition raised at admission arrives in the laboratory as an order. A released result appears against the patient for the treating doctor. A prescription written in the consulting room reaches the pharmacy counter. A ward request reduces store stock. Each charge lands on the patient's bill where it was raised.
None of those steps involves anyone re-typing what another department already entered, which is where hospitals lose most of their time and introduce most of their errors. What that removes, step by step, is set out on the hospital automation software page.
Who sees what
Access is role-based. A user sees the screens their job needs — the front desk works on registration and billing, a nurse on the ward, a pharmacist on the counter — rather than every user seeing the whole hospital. The same rule holds whether TechMediz runs in the cloud or on a server in your own building, which is covered on the cloud and local server page.
Coding and connected systems
Diagnoses are coded to ICD-10 as they are recorded and carried into the discharge summary, and the medical records department can search cases by ICD code. Laboratory analysers connect through LIS integration, imaging through PACS, and other systems through the integration options described on the hospital software integration page.
