A patient record app to replace the register

Name, age, gender and a phone number are enough to start. The form also has CNIC, father's name, a second number, email, address, occupation, who referred them, and health insurance details, for the times you need them. If you prefer, enter a date of birth instead of an age.

On the phone you can also pick the name and number straight from your contacts, which saves typing for the patients who have messaged you before.

Type a few letters of the name or part of the phone number, and matching patients appear as you type. People often remember their number better than the spelling of their name, so searching by number is the one you will use most.

The last patients you opened stay at the top of the home screen. And every prescription the app prints carries a QR code with the patient's ID: scan it with the button next to the search box and that patient's file opens.

Some patients you want close at hand: an ortho case you see every month, someone recovering from surgery, a diabetic you are adjusting medicines for. Press the bookmark on their file and they appear under Pins on the home screen until you unpin them.

Each file has the patient's visits as cards or a table, a Payments tab with what was charged, paid and still owed, past prescriptions, and a gallery for photos. From the top of the file you can call the patient or open WhatsApp with one tap.

For dentists, every visit is tied to a tooth on the chart; for other clinics the same file holds complaint, history, allergies, investigations and diagnosis. What goes into the record.

Don't spend a weekend copying old registers into the app. Start with new patients from Monday, and add old patients when they come back, starting with what matters: allergies, history and current medicines. Keep the old registers on the shelf for a year or so. Within a few months nearly everyone you actually see is in the app.

A register can be read by anyone who leans over the desk, and lost to one monsoon leak. Records in FindClinica are on your phone and the devices you connect, synced to our server and backed up every day, so losing a phone doesn't mean losing your patients.

If you're still deciding between a register, an Excel sheet and an app, we wrote an honest comparison with costs.