What OPD software should do for a two doctor clinic

OPD software is what a small outpatient clinic runs at the front desk and in the consult room. Register the patient, put them in a queue with a token, call them in, write the prescription, take the money, close the day with a sheet that reconciles against the drawer. Every other bullet on a vendor page sits downstream of those six steps.

Those pages define it that way and stop. So this one does three other things: it names what they leave out, prints a price table built only from vendor pages that were opened, and walks a two doctor day with the rules written as numbers a buyer can hold a product to.

What the ranking pages leave out

• No price. Drlogy prints a phone number. MocDoc, Ezovion, MediNiv, SoftClinic GenX, Halemind and OPD+ route pricing to a demo form, so a reader leaves not knowing whether the product is Rs 999 or Rs 25,000 a month.
• No day. They list modules, so you never learn what the desk does between 9.00 and 9.15, or who may admit a patient.
• No rule with a number in it. No grace window, no minimum booking notice, and no answer to the one question that decides whether two doctors can share a waiting room: is the token series per clinic or per doctor?
• No method behind the wait estimate, and no statement of when the number should be withheld.
• Nothing at the money edges: what the base price covers per doctor, and whether messaging is bundled or metered.

What the category costs, from first party pages only

The arithmetic for the clinic in the brief: two doctors on Elaior is Rs 1,499 plus Rs 399, so Rs 1,898 a month. That is more than Practo's published plan at Rs 1,499 a month for unlimited doctors, and more than HealthPlix Pro at Rs 11,999 a year. Said plainly, because a page that hid it would not be worth reading. The base price covers exactly one doctor and the backend enforces that with a per clinic doctor allowance, so the number on the page is the number the account honours. What Elaior has against those figures is month to month billing with no setup fee, where Practo's Rs 1,499 needs a 1 year term.

One day, two doctors, open to close

The queue order, stated as lanes

A queue is not a list, it is a comparator, and a buyer should be able to read it. Elaior's has seven lanes:

1. Called: already sent in, kept at the top of the board.
2. Critical: flagged by the desk or the doctor, jumps the queue.
3. Due: a kept appointment whose slot has arrived, ahead of walk ins.
4. Walk in: plus appointments past the grace window, longest wait first.
5. Parked: an appointment that arrived early, held only while somebody is ahead.
6. Scheduled: booked, not arrived.
7. Stepped out.

So a token is a name rather than a place in the line: the lanes decide the order and the token is only the last tiebreak between two bookings. That comparator is written twice on purpose, once on the server in Go and once in TypeScript for the browser, so the desk board, the doctor's list and the server's next pick cannot disagree in the same room. The wait estimate is the other half: each finished consult folds that doctor's called to ended time into an exponentially weighted moving average with alpha 0.15, a sample longer than four hours is thrown away as implausible, and nothing shows at all until that doctor has 10 finished consults.

The consult room

Vendors call this EMR, and the question worth asking is how structured the prescription is, because a free text box is a document while a structured form is data. Elaior's is rows: one medicine per row, with timing, duration and a food relation as separate fields, and at approval the form flags two rows carrying the same salt, or a total past a ceiling it holds. Structure is what makes a follow up list or an export possible later. What a prescription should contain clinically is not a software question, and this page does not answer it.

Money, and the close of the day

Billing behaviour, not tax advice. In Elaior the tax figures are worked out once, when the invoice is issued, and written onto the invoice line, so a reprint months later shows what the bill said then rather than what the settings say today. And the day end sheet and the day book have to be the same arithmetic over different windows, or the clinic ends up holding two versions of yesterday.

• A day end sheet for one clinic day: collections split by what was being paid for, consult, pharmacy, procedure and other, with refunds netted and outgoings subtracted. It can be run for a past day too, because nobody reconciles at 8pm sharp.
• A day book that is those same numbers aggregated over a date range, capped at a year, and read only: expenses are still entered a day at a time on the day end sheet, which is what lets the two be compared at all.
• A monthly file for the accountant. In Elaior, one xlsx per month with exactly four sheets, named in the code Sales register, Payments, GST summary and Expenses, and the Payments sheet opens with the totals by mode. It is admin only, and it refuses to build at all rather than produce a skewed workbook when the clinic clock is not Asia/Kolkata.
• CSV exports in four kinds: patients, visits, billing and expenses. Both downloads are admin only and both write an audit row.
• An audit trail the application cannot rewrite. A trigger raises on every update and delete of the audit table unless a transaction scoped setting is on, and exactly one call site sets it, the demo clinic wipe.

What Elaior does not do

• No SMS, and no messaging vendor wired into the service anywhere. Follow up outreach is a WhatsApp click to send link, wa.me with the message already written for the desk to edit, or a phone call, and the outcome is logged either way. Practo bundles 3000 or 8000 free SMS into its published plans, which is not a point in Elaior's favour.
• Nothing with ABDM or ABHA. The patient table has carried a nullable abhaId column since the first migration and the service never reads it: no registry lookup, no consent flow, no record sharing. Competing vendors advertise ABDM, and HealthPlix lists it in both published plans.
• No track record. Zero paying customers, no reviews, and a domain registered in January 2026, so nothing here is an outcome claim.
• Pharmacy is a separate add on at Rs 999 a month per clinic, off by default.