Ward management — floor logistics, surgical consumption and cost centre analytics in one engine.
Electronic replenishment requests per ward, unit and day pattern — the proposal arrives pre-built, the nurse confirms or adjusts. OR consumption captured per patient episode at the point of care via barcode and NFC. Every movement charged to the patient account and the cost centre simultaneously. Seven-level analytic hierarchy from group to line of activity — no separate analytics pipeline.
Electronic ward requests
Replenishment request forms configured per hospital, floor and unit, pre-populated from historical consumption patterns and adjusted by day of week. The ward manager confirms or adjusts — not builds from scratch. Double-bin and double-cart models supported for uninterrupted supply.
OR consumption per patient
Tablet app for surgical teams: scan the material barcode or NFC tag, the system validates the active episode in that theatre and records the consumption against the patient account in the same gesture. Implant and prosthetic traceability by individual serial number to the specific patient.
7-level cost centre hierarchy
Analytic tree from group down to line of activity, passing through company, centre, service, unit and professional. Every purchase invoice, pharmacy consumption, maintenance order and external service imputes automatically to the correct node. No extraction to a reporting environment.
Closed patient account
Ward consumption feeds the patient's running account in the clinical billing module. The link between clinical activity and subsequent payer billing is complete and automatic — no end-of-month reconciliation, no manual charge entry.
The operational cost surface.
Floor supply · OR traceability · cost centre analytics · patient charge closure.
Floor-level supply logistics
Replenishment request forms are configured by hospital, floor and unit, pre-populated from historical consumption statistics and adapted by day of week — a Saturday has a different demand profile from a working day. The ward manager does not build the request from scratch: the system generates the proposal, the manager confirms or adjusts quantities. Three manual request channels handle edge cases: restricted (medications limited to a specific unit that require justification), return (unit back to central store) and urgent (typically for a theatre that has run short mid-procedure). A hierarchical authorisation workflow governs requests above configurable thresholds — each step records user, timestamp, reason and budget status. The double-bin model keeps one compartment available while the other replenishes; the double-cart variant distributes the load when demand is high or when segregation is required.
Surgical consumption at the point of care
The tablet application for operating theatres captures material consumption against the patient episode in the same gesture as use. The operator reads the patient wristband or types the identifier — the system validates that the patient has an active episode in that theatre and displays the name, episode number and responsible surgeon before any material is registered. Each material carries an EAN-128 barcode covering internal reference, lot and expiry date; the reader validates availability and preloads the default quantity. High-value implants, reusable instruments and surgical trays use NFC tags: a single tap reads the unique identifier, serial number, lot, expiry, sterilisation certificate and remaining use cycles — effective through surgical gloves and in wet environments where printed barcodes are obscured. Implant and prosthetic traceability is maintained by individual serial number to the specific patient, satisfying post-market surveillance and health alert requirements. Where material is held on consignment, the registration automatically triggers supplier notification for replenishment and the corresponding line in the monthly consignment billing.
Seven-level analytic cost hierarchy
The cost centre tree extends up to seven levels — group, company, centre, service, unit, professional, line of activity. The dimensions are configurable: a hospital group may add a business line dimension (private, mutual, public-funded) or a research project dimension without custom development. Every operational movement carries its analytic imputation implicitly. A purchase invoice generates the accounting entry and simultaneously imputes to the corresponding cost centre. A pharmacy consumption charged to a patient also imputes to the service that prescribed it. A maintenance work order on a piece of equipment imputes to the service that owns it. Budget-versus-actual reports, inter-centre comparatives, cost evolution by service or by professional and margins by line of activity are derived from data the engine already holds — no extraction to a reporting environment, no reconciliation against a downstream analytics system.
Patient account and billing closure
Ward consumption does not accumulate as an opaque aggregate. Each consumption is charged to the corresponding patient when applicable, feeding the patient's running account in the clinical billing module and the service-level analytics simultaneously. The link between clinical activity and subsequent payer billing — from the nurse's replenishment request through OR consumption to the payer claim — is complete and automatic. The cycle closes without a month-end reconciliation step and without manual charge entry by the billing team.
Why ward logistics is a billing problem, not just an inventory problem.
In most hospital implementations, ward supply and OR consumption are managed as inventory events — stock goes out, stock goes in, the count is updated. The connection to the patient episode is made manually at billing time, if at all. High-value implants sometimes carry individual traceability; consumables rarely do. The result is a billing cycle that depends on manual charge entry and a cost centre picture that arrives weeks after the activity it describes.
The ward management module treats every material movement as a financial and clinical event simultaneously. The moment a nurse confirms a replenishment quantity or a theatre technician scans an implant barcode, three things happen: the stock position updates, the patient account receives the charge, and the cost centre node receives the imputation. There is no separate step.
The OR consumption application is designed for the environment it operates in — surgical gloves, wet surfaces, partial barcode obstruction. NFC tags on implants and reusable instrument sets survive conditions where printed barcodes do not. The tablet interface is designed for a single-handed, one-gesture workflow. The system does the validation; the technician does the clinical work.
The seven-level cost centre hierarchy makes the ward management module the operational input for the hospital's management accounting. The finance director sees the same cost data as the service chief, derived from the same source, with no aggregation lag. The audit question — which service consumed this material, against which patient, in which episode — is answered by a single query against the transaction log.