Guides
Practical Guides to Running Hospitals With Better Software
Most writing about hospital software is written to be found rather than to be read: the same twenty benefits, restated. These guides are written from the opposite direction — from the operational problems we ran into building auraCare alongside a working hospital.
They are reference material rather than posts. Where a guide states something auraCare cannot do, it says so.
Terminology, without the vendor spin.
The acronyms in this market overlap so heavily that two vendors can describe entirely different products in identical words. These two guides set out what the terms usually mean, and where the usage genuinely conflicts.
What is a Hospital Management System?
What an HMS covers, what it usually does not, and why the module list is the least useful way to compare one.
Read the guideHMS vs HMIS
HMS, HMIS, HIMS, HIS, EMR, EHR and hospital ERP — what each term tends to mean and where they are used interchangeably.
Compare the termsSecurity requirements for hospital software
What the controls in the product actually are, and the questions worth putting to any vendor you evaluate.
Security controlsThe operational problems underneath.
These come from watching a hospital work rather than from a product roadmap. They are the problems that made us build auraCare the way we did.
Why hospital work breaks between departments
Handoffs are where visits go wrong, and where most software quietly relies on a phone call instead.
Read the guideHow hospitals can reduce OPD waiting times
Why waiting is usually a coordination problem rather than a capacity problem, and what can be changed without hiring.
Read the guideOne patient journey across the hospital
The model these guides keep returning to: one visit, followed from arrival to discharge.
The journey modelWhere to start, depending on why you are here.
If you are early in an evaluation and the acronyms are the obstacle, start with the two terminology guides. They will not make the decision for you, but they will stop you comparing an EMR against an operational system without noticing — which is the most common way a hospital software shortlist goes wrong before it has properly begun.
If you already know what you are buying and want to separate the candidates, the questions in the HMS guide are more useful than any feature matrix. They are deliberately awkward questions, and the answers vary far more than the module lists do.
If the problem is operational rather than commercial — patients waiting, departments not knowing what work exists, the same patient registered twice — start with the two operations guides. They describe the problems rather than the product, and both include a diagnostic you can run in your own hospital in an afternoon without buying anything.
And if you are here to work out whether auraCare is worth a conversation, the honest shortcut is the security page, which lists what the product does not do yet alongside what it does.
How these guides are written.
Worth stating plainly, because a great deal of what is published in this category is written to occupy a search result rather than to be useful.
- They are written from building auraCare alongside a working hospital, not assembled from other vendors’ marketing pages.
- Where a guide describes something auraCare does, it links to the page that explains it rather than pretending to be neutral.
- Where auraCare cannot do something, the guide says so rather than omitting it.
- They avoid statistics we have not measured. There are no invented percentages here, because we have not run a hospital long enough to have honest ones.
- They are revised when they turn out to be wrong, and the revision date is on the page.
What we are writing next.
Listed so you can ask for one to be brought forward. If something here would be useful to your hospital sooner, say so.
Cloud vs on-premise HMS
The trade-offs between a vendor-hosted service, a private cloud and hardware in your building — including who carries which risk.
How to choose hospital software
The questions that actually separate systems, and the ones that look decisive but are not.
Migrating from a legacy HMS
Inventory, mapping, validation, parallel running and cutover, without stopping the hospital.
Designing for multiple reception desks
What changes when a hospital has more than one front door and more than one place a patient can start.
Ask us the question directly.
If you are evaluating hospital software and a guide does not answer your question, ask us. We would rather answer a specific question about your hospital than write another general page.
That includes the questions where the answer is that auraCare does not do it yet.
No generic product tour required.