Where do you record the lab tests you advised?

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OPD software with lab investigations - UpcharHub

Where does the test I advised actually get written down?

In the visit form, below the medicines, behind a button marked “Add investigation”. The block starts closed, because most visits order nothing and an always-open block pushes Save off a 390px phone screen for every doctor who never uses it. Tap it and the heading reads Investigations — tests you are ordering. Each test is a row: a name box, with the placeholder CBC, HbA1c, X-ray chest…, and under it an optional note box, placeholder Fasting, before next visit…. Type into the bottom row and another blank row appears beneath it, so there is no Add row button to hunt for and no way to end up with a form that cannot take the next test. Blank rows are dropped when you save.

Do I have to spell HbA1c out every time?

Type h and b and it offers HbA1c. Thirty test names are built in, ordered by how often an Indian general practice orders them rather than A to Z: CBC, ESR, CRP, RBS, FBS, PPBS, HbA1c, Lipid profile, LFT, KFT, Serum creatinine, Urea, Uric acid, TSH, T3 T4 TSH, Urine routine, Urine culture, Stool routine, Widal, Dengue NS1, Malaria parasite, Typhidot, Vitamin D, Vitamin B12, Serum electrolytes, X-ray chest PA, USG abdomen, ECG, 2D Echo and Blood group. It matches anywhere in the name, not only the start, and shows at most six at a time — type urine and you get Urine routine and Urine culture. The point is not the typing it saves. It is that CBC and HbA1c get spelt the same on every prescription you print, so a year of them reads as one list.

What if the test I want is not one of those thirty?

You type it, and it is kept exactly as you typed it. Serum ferritin is not one of the thirty. Nothing turns red, nothing asks you to pick from a menu, nothing silently corrects it — it saves, and it prints, spelt the way you spelt it. The suggestions are a keyboard shortcut, not a vocabulary. What the server does is trim, not judge: it keeps 120 characters of the test name and 200 of the note, accepts up to 30 tests on one visit, and turns a stray newline or tab into a space, because this ends up on one line of a printed page.

Do the results come back into it?

No. Not now and not later, and this is the line worth reading twice before you switch. UpcharHub is not connected to any lab or LIS. There is no file upload anywhere in the product — not for a report, not for a scan, not for a photograph. There is no pending or completed status on a test, no result column, no trend graph of your patient's HbA1c. A stored test is two fields, name and note, and a test in the release suite proves it: send a row carrying a result and a status and what gets stored is the name and the note, with the rest dropped at the door. The report the lab prints is still a piece of paper, and filing it is still your compounder's job. This records the order. That is the whole feature, and building the other half is a lab information system, which this product decided not to build.

Can I save a visit where I only ordered tests?

Yes. A patient you examined and sent for blood work has had a visit, and the form treats it as one. The only thing refused is a visit with nothing in it at all, and the refusal names every field that counts: “Nothing to save yet — add a complaint, a diagnosis, a vital, a medicine or a test.” It appears in amber, inline, right above the button you pressed. The guard exists for one reason — so that Save and print cannot put a blank page carrying your name and your registration number into a patient's hand.

What does it look like on the printed prescription?

A numbered list under the heading “Investigations advised”, printed after the medicines table and above your signature. Numbered, because a technician at the lab reads down a list and ticks it off, and “the second one” has to mean something. A note prints on the same line after a dash: 1. Serum ferritin — fasting. There is exactly one signature on the page and the test list sits above it, because the prescription and the lab order are one instruction — they leave together, they are carried to a chemist and a lab, and they are signed once. Below the tear line is the dispensed slip, which carries no signature, because it is a receipt, not a prescription. One detail you would otherwise meet on paper: a visit that orders tests and prescribes nothing does not print “No medicines.”

Will the chart still say it when he comes back in three weeks?

Yes, on the visit card in his history: Investigations: HbA1c, Serum ferritin (fasting) — the note in brackets after the test. That is the question you open a chart to answer, and a list that exists only on a page the patient took home cannot answer it. The chart is not a read-only archive either. Add visit sits at the top of it, and each past visit carries Print again and Share, and — on your own patients — Copy to new visit, which brings the test list into the fresh visit along with the complaints and the medicines, so a repeat panel for a diabetic is a tap and an edit rather than a retype.

Can my receptionist fill this in?

No, and that is deliberate. When the front desk queues a patient, the intake it writes is complaints, vitals and a note — and the visit is created with an empty investigations list: the tests are the doctor's, not reception's. What to test for is a clinical decision, so the block lives on the doctor's visit form and nowhere else.

Does the block work if my screen is in Hindi?

The labels do. The heading becomes जाँचें, the button becomes जाँच जोड़ें, the sub-label reads — जो जाँचें आप लिख रहे हैं, and the placeholders change with it. Two things stay in English on purpose: the thirty suggested names, and the heading on the printed page, which is “Investigations advised” whichever language your screen is in. English is what the lab reads. Your own typing is never translated in either direction — what you wrote is what prints.

Can I speak the tests instead of typing them?

Not yet, and you should know that before you rely on it. Dictation fills the complaint, the diagnosis, the vitals and the medicines: say the visit in Hindi or English and those four blocks get written up for you to check. It does not fill the investigations block. You tap Add investigation and type the tests — a few keystrokes with autocomplete, and still an extra step for a doctor who dictates the whole visit.

Why does a national audit checklist care what tests you wrote down?

Because “investigations advised” is a scored item in it. The Prescription Audit Guidelines published by the National Health Systems Resource Centre with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare list it as criterion 24, and the formula printed beside it is number of prescriptions with investigations divided by number of prescriptions audited. The gap it is measuring is real: in a published audit of 120 OPD prescriptions at a rural hospital in Delhi, of the 72 prescriptions that needed investigations only 59.7% actually had investigations written on them, and a diagnosis appeared on 64.2% (J Educ Health Promot 2019;8:37). A test you ordered out loud and did not write down is a test that, three weeks later, nobody in the room can name. The heading UpcharHub prints is the checklist's own wording.