Why Caresoft

Twenty years. One system. The same two people.

Caresoft has built hospital software for twenty years — bootstrapped, never sold, never changed hands. Everything we make sits on one system, and the people who built it are still here.

Digital IPD is the newest room in a building we have been working on since the start.

Prassant Kumar
portrait

Prassant Kumar, Co-founder

In 2005 Smita and I came to Bombay from Patna with a six-month-old daughter, two engineering degrees and enough money to last a month. We had been comfortable in Patna and never quite satisfied there. She was the one who said we should go and find out what else we were capable of.

Caresoft began the following year. We had no capital and no introductions, and we sold hospital management software to whoever in the city would agree to see us. Some did. Most did not.

Those years taught us the thing that has governed every year since. When a hospital runs on your software, you do not get to leave. A system that fails here does not inconvenience a customer — it holds up a discharge, a dose, a family waiting in a corridor.

The first hospitals that trusted us had no reason to. We were two strangers from Patna with a product and a promise, and what they handed us was not a contract but the running of their wards. You do not repay a trust like that. You keep answering it — by being there when they call, year after year, same name, same two people, bootstrapped, twenty years on.

We have spent those twenty years with hospitals, not near them. We know where the paper collects, where the same entry gets made twice, what a nurse is doing at two in the morning. Every room in the hospital has had that knowledge built into it.

The ward is the last one. It is the room we would like to finish the building with.

Prassant KumarCo-founder, Caresoft

Smita Kumar
portrait & video

Hover to play · click for sound

Smita Kumar, Co-founder

Most healthcare technology struggles in Indian hospitals for the same reason. It is built for a hospital that looks nothing like yours, and it expects your people to adapt to it. I have spent twenty years arguing the opposite case — that the system takes the shape of the hospital, not the reverse.

Which is why we have never assembled our software out of other people's parts. When a hospital tells me something does not fit, I want to be able to answer that we will change it — not that we will ask someone.

I have spent years in rooms with doctors and hospital administrators across this country, and the ward came up in almost all of them. It was the one part of the hospital everybody had quietly agreed would stay on paper. I did not agree. Bedside documentation is the hardest thing to digitise in an Indian hospital, and that is exactly why it was worth taking on.

Within a few years every hospital in this country will be required to produce structured digital records. The ones that began at the bedside will meet that without noticing. The rest will meet it in a hurry. I intend ours to be in the first group.

Smita KumarCo-founder, Caresoft

What we build

Four products. One system underneath.

Caresoft HIS

The hospital information system everything else is built on — admissions, pharmacy, laboratory, billing, records. More than a thousand hospitals have run on it across twenty years.

Digital IPD

Bedside inpatient documentation on a tablet. The nurse writes at the bed, and the note is already inside the system the rest of the hospital works in.

Digital OPD

The outpatient side of the same idea — registration, queue, consultation notes, prescription and billing on one record.

AppDoc

A patient-facing app carrying the hospital's own name, for the period after the patient goes home.

None of this was acquired, licensed or bolted together. The same team built all four, on the same foundation, which is why a note written in the ward needs no bridge to reach the pharmacy.