How Shanti Hospital Reduced OPD Wait Time from 2 Hours to 25 Minutes in Indore

Shanti General Hospital had been serving Indore's Vijay Nagar area for 22 years, growing from a 30-bed nursing home to a 100-bed general hospital with 8 departments. Despite the physical expansion, the hospital's operations remained rooted in paper -- patient registration in thick ledgers, billing on carbon-copy receipt books, medical records in cardboard files, and nursing notes on loose sheets.

OPD was the most visible problem. Patients arrived at 8 AM for a 9 AM appointment and routinely waited 2+ hours. The registration desk was a bottleneck -- each registration took 5-7 minutes as staff copied details from Aadhaar cards into registers. There was no queue management, no estimated wait times, and no communication to patients about delays. The hospital's Google reviews were dominated by wait time complaints.

Billing errors were costing real money. Manual calculation of charges across multiple departments (consultation, pharmacy, lab, procedures, room charges) led to frequent mistakes. The accounts team estimated INR 8 lakh annually in billing errors -- undercharges that went unrecovered and overcharges that led to disputes. GST compliance was particularly problematic, with the CA flagging inconsistencies every quarter.

Discharge summaries were another pain point. Doctors dictated summaries to a typist who prepared them on a desktop computer. Each summary took 30-45 minutes. For the 15-20 daily discharges, this created a bottleneck that delayed bed turnover and frustrated patients eager to leave.

GoMeds AI deployed its Hospital Management System across all departments of Shanti Hospital in a 10-week phased implementation.

The OPD transformation started with digital registration. Patient registration was reduced to under 2 minutes using Aadhaar-linked quick registration, with returning patient lookup by phone number. A digital token system replaced the chaotic first-come-first-served queue, with patients receiving WhatsApp updates on their position and estimated consultation time. Appointment booking was launched online, allowing patients to choose time slots and arrive just 10 minutes before their scheduled time.

Billing was unified across all departments into a single system. When a patient was admitted, all charges -- room, pharmacy, lab, procedures, doctor fees -- accumulated automatically in their patient account. At discharge, the bill was generated with a single click, with correct GST calculations and department-wise breakdowns. The system also implemented auto-charge capture for commonly missed items like consumables and nursing procedures.

Discharge summary generation was automated through templates. Doctors selected the diagnosis, and the system pre-populated the summary with admission details, investigation results, medication prescribed, procedures performed, and follow-up instructions from the patient record. The doctor reviewed and customised the summary rather than creating it from scratch. Average generation time dropped from 45 minutes to 5 minutes.