Hospital management system for Darbhanga Medical College & Hospital

The problem

A government medical college hospital runs at a volume that paper cannot absorb. Registration queues form early, records live in registers that cannot be searched, billing is reconciled by hand at the end of each shift, and a patient asking for a test report has no way to get one without returning to the counter.

The requirement was not a single application. It was a set of departmental systems — each with its own staff, workflow and vocabulary — that had to share one patient identity.

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Approach

The system was built module by module rather than as one release. Registration and the counter went first, because that is where the queue is and where trust is won. Pharmacy, diagnostics and the wards followed once the front desk was stable.

Django carried the domain logic and gave every department an admin surface from the start. PostgreSQL holds the record of truth, with Redis caching and PgBouncer connection pooling in front of it so a busy counter does not queue on database connections.

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What was built

• Counter and registration — patient identity, department and doctor allocation, repeat-visit lookup and daily collection registers
• IPD — admission, ward and bed allocation, transfers, daily charges and discharge
• Pharmacy and medicine store — drug masters, indents, issues, batch and expiry tracking across dispensary and central store
• Pathology — test ordering, sample tracking, result entry and report generation
• Radiology — study scheduling, report authoring and delivery, running as its own departmental system
• Cardiology — department-specific investigation and reporting workflow
• Blood bank — donor and unit registers, grouping, cross-match and issue records
• Record room — medical records filing, retrieval and movement tracking
• Attendance — biometric-backed staff and student attendance with rosters and audit reports
• Patient report lookup — a public endpoint that lets a patient pull their own reports by mobile number instead of returning to the counter

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Running it

The system is deployed behind Nginx and Gunicorn as managed systemd services, with Celery workers and a beat scheduler for background work, static assets served through WhiteNoise and PgBouncer pooling database connections. Debug output is environment-gated and hosts are explicitly allow-listed.

This is not a delivered-and-forgotten project. I continue to operate it: new departmental modules, performance work as volume grows, backups and the incident response when something at the counter needs fixing today.