Inpatient Module — Overview

The Inpatient (Inward) module manages the full lifecycle of a hospital stay, from admission through bed allocation, clinical care, billing, and discharge. It is built around one central concept:

BHT (Bed Head Ticket) — the unique identifier for one admission episode. One BHT = one admission = one eventual final bill.

A patient may have many BHTs across multiple admissions; each is independent and produces its own interim bill, professional fees, pharmacy issues, deposits and final bill.

Top-level menu

The module is reached from the Inpatient menu (privilege: Inward). The submenus are:

Submenu	Privilege	Purpose
Admissions	InwardAdmissions	Admit a patient, edit admission, change patient on a BHT
Appointment	InwardAppointmentMenu	Pre-book and convert appointments into admissions; room reservations
Room	InwardRoom	Room occupancy, vacancy, room change, guardian room change
Services & Items	InwardServicesAndItems	Add services, investigations, outside charges, professional fees, timed services
Billing	InwardBilling	Interim bill (and search), estimated interim bill
Search	InwardSearch	Admissions, service bills, professional bills, provisional bills, final bills
Pharmacy	InwardPharmacyMenu	Ward requests, direct issues to BHT, theatre issues, returns
Inpatient Reports	—	Admission book, discharge book, room income, charge type, doctor payment

Most clinical and financial actions converge on the Inpatient Dashboard (admission_profile.xhtml) — see Inpatient Admission Profile (Dashboard).

End-to-end workflow

Admit a Patient (BHT generated)
      ↓
Room Assignment (same step or after admission, depending on config)
      ↓
Clinical Care
   • Services & investigations    • Outside charges
   • Professional fees            • Timed services (room rent, O₂, etc.)
   • Surgeries                    • Ward medications
   • Pharmacy issues (request / direct)
      ↓
Room Change(s) if needed
      ↓
Patient Transfer between wards if needed
      ↓
Clinical Discharge  (privilege: InpatientClinicalDischarge — in progressive rollout)
      ↓
Room Discharge   (the bed is released)
      ↓
Final Bill   (charges totalled, deposits / credit company allocations applied)
      ↓
Final Bill Payment   (cash, card, deposits, credit company)
      ↓
Professional / Staff / Surgery payments to consultants

The same BHT also drives:

• Interim bills at any point during the stay (running total).
• Estimated bills projecting the final bill while the patient is still admitted.
• Deposits collected during the stay and reduced from the final bill.
• Credit-company settlements when one or more insurers pay parts of the bill.

Who does what

Role	Typical pages
Admission counter	Admit a Patient, Edit Admission Details, Patient Lookup
Ward clerk	Room Occupancy, Inpatient Dashboard, Room Change
Nurse	Nursing Workbench, Allergies, Ward Medications, Pharmacy BHT requests
Consultant / MO	Clinical Assessment, Discharge Medications, Clinical Discharge
Billing	Add services, Interim Bill, Final Bill Generation, Final Bill Payment, Patient Deposits
Cashier (credit)	Credit company settlements (see Inward Admission Insurance and Credit Company Details)
Pharmacy	Direct Issue to BHTs, BHT issue requests, returns
Theatre	Surgery workbench, surgery professional fees

What is not in the module today

These features are sometimes assumed to be present. They are not in the current code and are not documented as working features:

• A real-time, color-coded ward board with reservation overlap detection. Only a basic occupancy table exists — see Room Occupancy and Vacancy.
• A clinical decision support engine that auto-checks drug-drug interactions, allergy conflicts, critical lab values, or care-protocol reminders. Allergies are recorded as a list on the admission and shown to the user; no automatic blocking or pop-up is generated.
• A structured Medication Administration Record (MAR) capturing every dose at bedside with timestamps. Ward medications exist as prescriptions; the act of administering each dose is not separately captured.
• A formal nursing care-plan template / library.
• A discharge TAT (turnaround time) monitoring dashboard for Medical Discharge / Billing / Pharmacy. Individual timestamps exist on records but no aggregate dashboard is exposed.

See also

• Admit a Patient
• Inpatient Admission Profile (Dashboard)
• Inpatient EHR — Overview
• Inpatient — Room Discharge
• Inpatient — Final Bill Generation
• Admin — Inpatient Module Configuration Overview
• Inward Admission Insurance and Credit Company Details