How to Use This
Send these questions before the demo and ask the vendor to show, not tell, during it. Score each answer. A confident product answers most of them without hedging.
Fit and Workflow
1. Document my three most common visit types live. 2. How is a walk-in added alongside booked appointments? 3. Show the doctor's queue dashboard. 4. How are follow-up and free-revisit rules applied? 5. Show consultation templates and how I build one. 6. How does a visit become a bill without re-entry? 7. Show mixed-payment billing and a GST invoice. 8. Show the daily closing and cash handover report. 9. How are discounts approved and logged? 10. Show refunds and cancellations with the audit trail.
Reports
11. Show revenue per doctor and per service. 12. Show outstanding dues with ageing. 13. Show new vs returning patients over time. 14. Show appointment fill rate and no-show rate. 15. Can I schedule reports to my email?
Data Ownership
16. Can I export all my data on demand, myself? 17. In what format, and does it include attachments and audit logs? 18. What happens to my data if I stop paying? 19. Who owns the data, in writing? 20. Where is it hosted, and is it in India?
Pricing
21. Total monthly cost at my volume, all-in. 22. Is pricing per user, per doctor, or flat? 23. Per-message rate for SMS and WhatsApp, and any markup. 24. Setup, migration and training fees. 25. Renewal price in writing for years two and three.
Support
26. Channels and hours; is there phone or WhatsApp support? 27. Response and resolution SLAs. 28. Who handles data migration, and how long? 29. Is there onboarding training, and how much? 30. How are outages communicated?
Security and Compliance
31. Role-based access and audit trails, shown live. 32. Encryption at rest and in transit. 33. Backup frequency and a tested restore. 34. ABDM capabilities today and the roadmap. 35. Consent capture and storage. 36. Data breach notification process.
Reliability and Exit
37. Uptime over the last twelve months. 38. Is there an offline mode? 39. Reference customers of my size and specialty I can call. 40. Notice period to cancel, and the offboarding process.
The Deciding Factor
If a vendor is evasive on data export, ownership, or renewal pricing, stop there. Everything else is negotiable; those three are not.