How do two doctors in one clinic open each other's patient files?

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OPD software for shared family practice

Why not just give my partner my password?

Because the page you hand the patient has to name one doctor, and a shared login cannot. Regulation 3.7.2 of the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002 — the code in force, published on nmc.org.in — says a physician shall write his name and designation in full along with registration particulars in his prescription letter head, and Regulation 1.4.1 requires the registration number on all his prescriptions. On one shared login every visit is written by the account, so the number on the paper is whoever's profile was filled in, including for consultations that doctor never did. In UpcharHub each doctor signs in with their own Google account, and every visit stores who recorded it as a separate field from whose register it sits in. The doctor who covered gets their own name on the printout; the doctor who was away does not get somebody else's.

How do I invite the other doctor?

Home screen, then Shared practice. Type a name in Practice name — the help line says “The doctors you invite will see this name” — and tap Create the practice. The roster replaces the form and you are in it. Then one field: Their Google email, and Invite doctor. You cannot invite a stranger into a patient list. The address has to belong to a doctor who already has an UpcharHub account, and an address that does not is refused in words: “No UpcharHub account for that email yet — ask them to sign up, then invite them.” A doctor who is already in someone else's practice is refused too — “That doctor already belongs to a practice” — because a doctor is in one practice or none.

What crosses before they accept?

Nothing, in either direction. A pending invitation is a question, not a membership, and the code that decides whose records a reader may open treats a pending row as no row at all — so your colleague sees none of your patients, and you see none of theirs, until the moment they tap Accept. Your roster shows their name with the badge “Invited — has not answered yet”. They see the invitation on their own home screen the next time they sign in, with one line saying what it changes and two answers: Accept and share, or Decline. Nobody can answer it for them — the server reads the invitee from the signed-in session and never from the request. Declining deletes the row entirely, so they can be invited again later. The email that tells them to go and look carries no invitation link and no code — the only address in it is the ordinary sign-in page: zero tokens, zero accept URLs, and a test fails the build if either ever appears, because a link that joins a practice is a credential sitting in a WhatsApp thread.

What can my colleague actually see once they accept?

Your patients and your visit notes, and that is the whole list. Their patient list, their name-or-phone search and the chart itself now include your register alongside their own; opening a chart shows the complaints, diagnosis, medicines and investigations exactly as you typed them. Every row that is not theirs carries a quiet mark with the owner's name, so nobody opens a colleague's file thinking it is their own. What does not cross: your dispensary shelf, your settings and letterhead, and your waiting room. A colleague cannot put your patient into their own queue; that stays refused.

Can the covering doctor record today's visit, or only read it?

They can record it. Add visit works on a colleague's chart, and the line under the button says what it does — that you are recording this for the other doctor, that it stays on their chart, and that it is signed by you. Both halves are literal. The visit is filed under the register the patient belongs to, so it appears in that doctor's history the next time they open the file — nobody has to send anything to anybody — and the patient is not transferred between clinics by a consultation. Who did the consulting is stored separately, and that is the name and registration number that go on the paper. It also means the reverse: only the doctor who recorded a visit can edit it.

Can my partner print the prescription for a visit I wrote?

No, and that refusal is the point of the feature rather than a gap in it. Tap Print again on a visit somebody else recorded and UpcharHub stops: “Only the doctor who recorded this visit can print it under their name.” Share does the same, so the WhatsApp PDF cannot leak past the print guard. In India the registration number on a prescription is who answers for it, and the alternatives were both worse — print it under the reader's name, which misattributes a consultation, or print it with no prescriber at all, which is a page nobody is accountable for. Regulation 3.5 of the 2002 code already draws this line for the covering doctor: the same privilege, with its obligations, belongs to the consultant when sent for in an emergency during the absence of the attending physician. The obligations come with the privilege, so the paper names the doctor who was in the room.

Does the dispensary get shared too?

No. Medicine stock is counted per doctor, and a practice does not widen it by one strip. Every dispensary screen and every stock movement is scoped to the doctor whose shelf it is, so your partner's counts are theirs and yours are yours — which matches how the cupboard actually works in a clinic where two doctors buy separately from the chemist. Records cross; stock counts do not.

How do I take the access back?

Three ways, and all of them are one tap. On your own row in the roster, Leave — the confirmation says your patients stay yours and the other doctors will no longer be able to open them. On someone else's row, if you created the practice, Remove. Or close the practice, which ends every membership in it at once. None of this is a scheduled job. Whether a doctor may open your chart is re-derived on every single request — three database reads, membership then practice then roster, deliberately never cached — so a doctor removed at 11:04 is refused on their next tap, not sixty seconds later. The row that recorded them survives as either left or removed, because it is the only record of the period during which your register was reachable, and a shared front-desk seat granted through the practice ends in the same request.

Who is answerable for the patient's data — me or the software?

You, and the Act says so in one sentence. Under section 2(i) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 a Data Fiduciary is any person who alone or in conjunction with other persons determines the purpose and means of processing of personal data — that is the doctor, not the tool. Section 8(1) then makes the Data Fiduciary responsible for compliance irrespective of any agreement to the contrary, for processing undertaken by it or on its behalf by a Data Processor. The clock is public: notification G.S.R. 843(E) of 13 November 2025, published in the Gazette of India Extraordinary the next day, brings sections 3 to 17 and most of the substantive duties into force eighteen months from publication — May 2027 — with the consent-manager provisions at one year. So no software makes you compliant, and UpcharHub does not claim to. What it does is narrower and checkable: sharing needs a yes from both doctors, it is revocable by either of them, and it goes patient-by-patient rather than pooling two registers into one list nobody can un-mix.

What does a shared practice not do?

Five things, said plainly, because you will find them out on a busy morning otherwise. The server writes a row for every read that crosses between two doctors, and for a visit a colleague adds to your chart, and the app has no screen that shows you those rows yet — the data is there, the page is not. The chart does not label which past visit was written by which doctor; you learn it when Print refuses. A colleague cannot check your patient into their own waiting list, so on a covering day the patient is called in from the register, not the queue. A doctor belongs to exactly one practice — there is no second clinic on Thursdays. And only the doctor who created the practice can invite, remove or close it; a member's own controls are Leave and nothing else. The printout, as everywhere else in UpcharHub, is an unsigned draft until the treating doctor signs it.