Patient Registration & Master Index

Every hospital's data quality is decided in the first minutes at the front desk. EloHIMS turns that first point of contact into a single, authoritative act of capture — a unique Medical Record Number that anchors every visit, admission, prescription and bill for life — along with who pays for it, and the identity checks a welfare concession depends on.

Everything the front desk needs, nothing it doesn't

Payer type, panel and member number at registration

The registration form has a Payer section: cash, panel, insurance, scheme or welfare. A panel, insurance or scheme patient is linked to the right payer from the hospital's list — the payer's kind must match the type chosen — with their member number and card expiry.

From then on the payer drives the price each service is billed at and whether a bill can go to the panel on credit, and a payer badge travels with the patient. Payer details change only when someone edits them on purpose, so a demographic correction made elsewhere never resets a panel patient to cash. More on the insurance and panels page.

CNIC or B-form, and a duplicate check where it matters most

CNIC and B-form numbers are held on the patient's file. A welfare concession — any band that takes money off the bill — is refused for a patient with neither, and anything shorter than a full 13-digit number does not count. A B-form on its own is accepted, since it is the number a child's CNIC later carries.

If another file carries the same CNIC or B-form — written with or without dashes — and already holds a live or pending concession, the assessment is refused and the other MRN, patient and band are named, so the welfare desk can see a duplicate before it pays twice. Online bookings, too, match an existing file by CNIC before opening a new one.

Treat first, identify later — then merge into the real MRN

With Emergency set to treat first, an unidentified arrival is registered with only the gender and approximate age seen, under an "Unknown-" file on the hospital's normal MRN scheme. Charges, payments, tokens, vitals and allergies are recorded against it while the patient is treated.

Once the patient is identified, the ER visit shows a merge banner. A user with the merge right gives a reason and merges the unknown file into the real one: every record on it moves across, along with the bill's customer account, in a single step that either completes in full or changes nothing. The unknown file is retired with a note, the merge is logged for the Merge Audit report, and it cannot be merged twice. See emergency department management.

A newborn's own MRN, linked to the mother

Recording a live birth in the labour room opens the baby's own file — "Baby of" the mother, with date and time of birth, sex and birth weight noted — on the next MRN, linked both ways to the mother's file. A birth recorded before this can be given its file with one button.

If the baby needs the NICU, it is admitted under its own MRN, not the mother's. The birth register shows each baby's MRN, and the patient profile links a mother to her babies. More on obstetrics and maternity.

One master index, captured once at the front desk

Front-desk staff can run a full registration or a quick-register when the queue is moving, and the details entered once flow automatically into OPD, IPD, Emergency, pharmacy, billing and every clinical screen. No re-keying, no parallel spreadsheets, no guessing which "Muhammad" is the right one.

Because every downstream module is built on trustworthy identity captured once at the front desk, the patient's record stays whole — and the money stays billable.