MISReportsHospital management
Daily MIS reports every hospital owner should read
Five daily numbers a hospital owner should read: collections by mode, bed occupancy, dues, pharmacy margin and doctor-wise OPD, and what each one tells you.
- Author
- Kentron Technologies
- Published
- Reading time
- 6 min read
The daily MIS a hospital owner should read fits on one screen: collections by mode of payment, bed occupancy, outstanding dues, pharmacy margin and doctor-wise OPD counts. Five numbers, read every morning against yesterday and the same day last week, tell you whether the hospital is healthy long before the monthly accounts do.
Most HMIS products can produce a hundred reports. Owners read none of them, because a hundred is too many and nobody said which five matter. This article says which five, what to look for in each, and what question to ask when a number moves.
What should the collections report show?
Collections is the number most owners already look at, usually as one total. The total hides the problems. Break it down.
- By mode: cash, UPI, card, bank transfer, cheque. Cash that falls while UPI rises is normal; cash that falls while everything else is flat is a question for the desk.
- By department: OPD, IPD, pharmacy, lab, radiology. A quiet lab on a busy OPD day means tests are being ordered and not collected, or collected and not billed.
- By user: who collected what. Every receipt has a login on it, and the report should show the split.
- Refunds and cancellations, with the reason and the approver. A cancelled bill is a bill that was raised and then removed; the pattern matters more than the amount.
- Discounts given, by user and by doctor. This is the line owners find most surprising in the first week.
How should you read occupancy?
Occupancy is beds occupied divided by beds available, at a fixed time each morning. Read it with three companions.
- Admissions and discharges yesterday, so that a stable percentage does not hide a hospital that is emptying and filling at the same rate.
- Average length of stay for the patients discharged yesterday, by doctor. Long stays are sometimes clinical and sometimes a summary that was not written.
- Expected discharges today, so that admissions knows what it can promise.
- Beds out of service and beds in cleaning. A bed that has been in cleaning for two days is a bed that nobody updated.
Which dues need daily attention?
| Type of due | How to read it | Action when it grows |
|---|---|---|
| Inpatient deposits against interim bills | Patients whose running bill exceeds the deposit | The ward asks for a top-up today, not at discharge |
| Patient credit after discharge | Bills settled with a promise, by patient and days since discharge | A call from the desk within the week; a write-off decision after a set period |
| TPA and insurer claims | Submitted, queried, approved, settled, by TPA and age | Work the oldest first; read the deduction reasons monthly |
| Government scheme claims | Same stages as TPA, by scheme | Follow the scheme portal's timelines and escalate what is stuck |
| Corporate and panel clients | Monthly invoices and payments received | Statement of account on the first of the month, every month |
| Supplier dues (what you owe) | By supplier and due date | Pay on time to keep credit terms; dispute short supplies in writing |
The total outstanding, and its ageing, is the single number that predicts a cash crunch. The TPA workflow that keeps claims moving is what keeps this line from growing.
Why watch pharmacy margin daily?
Pharmacy margin is sales at billed price less the cost of the batches sold. It moves for reasons that are easy to fix when caught in a day and expensive when caught in a quarter.
- A sudden fall usually means discounts, a batch received at a wrong purchase price, or free quantity not recorded.
- A sudden rise usually means a purchase not yet entered, so the cost is missing. It will correct itself and the owner should not celebrate.
- Near-expiry stock by value belongs next to margin, because expired stock is margin that has already been lost.
- Ward consumption against pharmacy issues shows whether a ward draws more than it charts.
The pharmacy article explains what the software has to record for this number to be true.
What does doctor-wise OPD tell you?
Patients per doctor per day, split into new and follow-up, with the doctor's scheduled start time against the first token called, and the average wait for that doctor's patients. Over a month this report shows which doctors bring patients, which doctors keep them, and which doctors are the reason the waiting area is full at 10 am. It is also the basis for any fair discussion about consultation fees and revenue share, because both sides are looking at the same numbers.
- New patients by referral source, where the desk records it.
- Conversion from OPD to admission and to investigations, by doctor.
- No-shows for booked slots, which tells you whether reminders are working.
How do you set this up in your HMIS?
- Pick the five reports and put them on one page, in this order: collections, occupancy, dues, pharmacy margin, doctor-wise OPD.
- Show yesterday, the same day last week and the month to date on every line. A number without a comparison is a fact without a meaning.
- Schedule the page to arrive on WhatsApp at a fixed time every morning. A report that must be opened is a report that is read on Mondays.
- Set two or three thresholds that turn a line red: a deposit shortfall above an amount, dues older than a period, margin below a percentage. Choose the values from your own history.
- Give one person the job of reading it and asking the questions, and put the answers in writing.
- Once a quarter, drop a line nobody has acted on and add one you kept looking for.
The MIS and analytics module in Healthixio produces these five reports from the same records that billing, wards and pharmacy use, with the WhatsApp delivery built in. Accreditation programmes such as NABH ask hospitals to monitor many of the same indicators, so the daily page also becomes the evidence file.
Frequently asked questions
Should the owner read the MIS daily, or is weekly enough?
Daily, for five minutes. The value is in catching a number the day it moves: a cash shortfall, a bed stuck in cleaning, a discount pattern. Weekly reading turns each of those into a week of losses before anyone asks. Keep the daily page short enough that reading it is a habit, and save the long reports for the monthly review.
What if our current software cannot produce these reports?
Then the data is probably incomplete rather than the report missing. Receipts without modes, beds without statuses or sales without batch costs cannot be reported however clever the software. Fix the capture first: every receipt with a mode and a user, every bed with a status, every pharmacy sale against a batch. The reports follow.
Who else in the hospital should see the daily MIS?
The administrator sees everything. The billing head sees collections and dues. The pharmacy in-charge sees margin, expiry and consumption. The nursing superintendent sees occupancy and discharge readiness. Each person sees the lines they can act on, through their own login, so that the owner's morning questions reach the person who already knows the answer.