Overview

CareChart is a self-hosted hospital management system built on Laravel 12 with a server-rendered Blade + Bootstrap 5 frontend — no Vue, no React, no build step. It covers thirteen staff roles across twenty-three modules: patient intake through discharge, pharmacy and lab operations, billing and insurance, HR and payroll, and hospital-wide security and audit logging.

This document describes what each module does and how the roles relate to each other. For installation steps, see the Setup Guide.

Tech Stack

Roles & Permissions

Every login lands on a dashboard built for that role specifically — nobody sees a menu item they can't use. Route-level middleware enforces this on the server, not just by hiding sidebar links.

Patients & Appointments

Patients self-register and book their own appointments by department and doctor; front-desk staff can do the same on their behalf, including a walk-in patient who's never logged in. Every appointment carries a full status lifecycle: pending → confirmed → completed, cancelled, or no-show.

• Doctor availability, consultation fee, and department drive what a patient can book
• Doctors manage their own bio, fee, and availability from their profile — no admin round-trip needed
• Status changes notify the other side automatically (patient told when confirmed; doctor told when requested)

OPD Visits

An OPD visit is where the record actually gets written: chief complaint, vitals, diagnosis, and a prescription with as many line items as the case needs. An optional AI summary condenses free-text notes into a clean clinical note.

IPD & Wards

Wards hold beds; beds hold one admission at a time. Admitting a patient occupies the bed automatically, discharging frees it. Day-count and ward daily-rate feed straight into billing.

Emergency

Triage by severity (critical / urgent / semi-urgent / non-urgent), register a patient who's never been seen before in the same form, and assign a doctor. "Admit to IPD" from an emergency case opens a real admission form pre-filled with that patient and links back to the case — there's no separate "admitted" checkbox that isn't actually backed by a bed.

Nursing

Nurses get their own portal: a task list assigned by admins or doctors (vitals check, medication, dressing, other), and a vitals log tied to a specific admission. Completing a task and logging vitals are two clicks, not a form hunt.

Operation Theatre

A small theatre status board (available / occupied / maintenance) and a surgery schedule. Marking a surgery "in progress" occupies its theatre; marking it complete or cancelled frees it again — the board is always accurate without a manual toggle.

Pharmacy

A medicine catalog with stock, reorder level, batch number, and expiry. Dispensing works two ways — against a doctor's prescription, or a walk-in/OTC sale — and both immediately decrement stock and flag anything that drops below its reorder level.

Laboratory

A lab test catalog (name, sample type, normal range, price). Doctors order from the OPD visit; technicians move an order from pending → sample collected → completed, entering a result and remarks per test.

Radiology

Same shape as the lab module, tuned for imaging: modality (X-ray/CT/MRI/ultrasound), findings, impression, and an optional uploaded report file the patient can later download from their own portal.

Inventory

General hospital supplies and equipment — separate from the pharmacy's medicine stock — organized by category, with stock in/out/adjustment transactions and the same low-stock flagging pattern used everywhere else in the app.

Blood Bank

A donor registry, per-blood-group stock levels, and patient blood requests. Issuing a request decrements the matching group's stock and notifies hospital admins if that group drops low.

Ambulance

A small fleet register and a trip log — dispatch, complete, or cancel a trip, and the vehicle's availability status updates itself accordingly.

Billing

Itemized bills across every category — consultation, OPD, IPD, pharmacy, lab, procedure, other — with partial payments, running balance, and a print-friendly invoice layout that hides everything except the invoice itself when you hit print.

Insurance

An insurance provider directory, per-patient policies with expiry tracking, and a claims workflow (pending → approved/rejected → paid) that can optionally tie back to a specific bill.

HR & Payroll

Employee profiles wrap an existing staff login — designation, joining date, salary structure. Monthly payroll generates net pay from that structure for every active employee at once, then tracks paid/pending per person.

Finance & Reports

Expense logging by category, and a reports dashboard that nets total revenue (bills + pharmacy sales) against expenses for a selected date range, alongside appointment volume and top-performing doctors.

AI Features

Two features, both optional, both toggled from a single switch in Admin → Settings:

• Patient Symptom Checker — a patient describes symptoms and gets a cautious, non-diagnostic read plus a recommended department. Every response states plainly that it isn't a diagnosis.
• Clinical Note Summarization — a doctor's free-text OPD notes get condensed into a clean summary for the record.

Security & Audit

• Two-factor authentication — self-implemented TOTP (RFC 6238), works with Google Authenticator, Authy, or any standard app. No SMS provider, no per-message cost.
• Audit log — create/update/delete events on the records that matter (users, patients, bills, admissions, prescriptions, payroll, and more) are logged automatically via a shared Auditable trait, viewable only by Super Admin.
• Role middleware — every route checks the logged-in user's role server-side; there's no page that's merely hidden from the menu but still reachable by URL.

Notifications

An in-app bell icon with a live unread count — no email or SMS service required. Currently wired into new appointment requests, appointment status changes, nursing task assignment, and low-stock alerts for pharmacy and blood bank.

Extending CareChart

A few things worth knowing before you add your own module:

• Kebab-case resource routes (like lab-tests) bind a snake_case parameter ($lab_test) for implicit model binding — match your controller method argument names accordingly.
• To add audit logging to a new model, add use Auditable; to its trait list — no other wiring needed.
• To send an in-app notification, call app(NotificationService::class)->send($user, $title, $body, $url, $icon) from any controller.
• Set DB_PREFIX in .env if you need a table prefix — every migration has been checked to stay under MySQL's 64-character identifier limit with a prefix applied.

Common Questions

For pricing, licensing, and demo-account questions, see the FAQ on the main product page. For every install step in order, see the Setup Guide.