A hospital information system in Pakistan that replaced seven tools without shutting a ward

1 The problem

A multi-facility hospital group in Punjab was running seven systems that did not talk to each other. The patient record lived in one, billing in another, pharmacy in a third. Clerks re-keyed the same CNIC and encounter up to four times. Nobody could answer how many beds were free without three phone calls. Two earlier HIS replacements — one from a multinational, one from a local vendor — had been abandoned mid-project after a promised weekend cutover that never quite happened.

2 Our approach

We did not attempt another big-bang cutover. SoftCity built a single patient record first and ran it beside the old systems, syncing both ways. Once ward staff trusted it, we migrated admissions, then pharmacy, then billing, with a rollback at every step. Training happened on the floor, on Urdu and English screens, during Ramadan shifts as well as ordinary weeks. The last legacy login was switched off in week 31. No facility lost a working system for an hour. That is the hospital information system work we still support from Civic Centre, Bahria Town, Islamabad.

3 What we built

• Two-way sync so old and new HIS could run in parallel
• Unified patient record with an audit trail on every field
• Role-based clinical access down to the field
• HL7 FHIR interfaces for lab and imaging
• Offline-tolerant ward tablets for rounds on weak Wi-Fi
• Real-time bed and theatre board the duty manager can actually use

4 Technology