Free template

OPD register format

The outpatient register is the one record a small hospital keeps even when it keeps nothing else — the day-book of who came, who saw them and what they paid. Below is a printable format with the columns a front desk genuinely needs, sample rows to show the shape, and blank ruled rows so the same sheet works as a hand-written register. Print it landscape on A4.

Updated 25 September 2026

In short

No Act prescribes OPD register columns — unlike Form F or the birth and death registers, this format is yours to set. What follows is what a busy OPD+IPD hospital needs in order to answer questions later.

Statutory format?: No — operational, not prescribed
Columns: 12, including fee and mode
Prints: A4 landscape
Blank rows: 10, numbered on

Prints landscape on A4. Replace the sample rows, or print as-is and write into the blank ones.

SAMPLE DATA — every name, number and fee below is invented for illustration

Sunrise Multispecialty Hospital (Sample)

12, MG Road, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu – 641001 (Sample) · Phone: 0422-400-1000 (Sample)

Outpatient Register

Date: 14 / 03 / 2026 · Shift: Morning · Sheet: 1 of ____

Outpatient register — one row per patient seen, with sample rows followed by blank ruled rows
S. No.	Time	MR No.	Patient name	Age / Sex	Contact	Department	Doctor	New / Follow-up	Fee (₹)	Mode	Remarks
1	09:10	MR-020114	Shabana Begum	34 / F	98450 xxxxx	Gynaecology	Dr A. Kulkarni	New	300	UPI	—
2	09:25	MR-018902	Rohan Pawar	6 / M	99012 xxxxx	Paediatrics	Dr S. Nair	Follow-up	0	—	Within 14 days
3	09:40	MR-020115	Lakshmi Devi	62 / F	90083 xxxxx	General medicine	Dr M. Rao	New	300	Cash	BP review
4	10:05	MR-020116	Imran Shaikh	28 / M	81234 xxxxx	Orthopaedics	Dr V. Joshi	New	400	Card	X-ray advised
5	10:20	MR-019770	Anitha R.	31 / F	94488 xxxxx	Gynaecology	Dr A. Kulkarni	Follow-up	0	—	ANC visit 3
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

Total patients: ______ · New: ______ · Follow-up: ______ · Collection (₹): ______

Signature — front desk / in-charge

Columns

Why each column is there

A register earns its keep months later, when someone asks a question nobody anticipated. These are the columns that answer those questions:

Time — Not just the date. A register with times shows you the arrival pattern, which is what actually decides how many doctors you need at 9am versus 4pm.
MR No. — The permanent number, assigned once and reused for every later visit. A register that records a fresh number each visit is how one patient becomes three files.
New / Follow-up — The single most under-kept column, and the one that decides whether a consultation is chargeable. Define your follow-up window in writing — 7, 14 or 30 days — and apply it the same way every time.
Fee and mode — Kept together so the day's collection reconciles from this sheet alone, without opening the billing software.
Department and doctor — Both, not one. Department gives you the specialty mix; doctor gives you attribution — and they are not interchangeable in a hospital where one doctor covers two departments.
Remarks — Deliberately last and deliberately free-text. Anything that recurs in this column three days running is a column you are missing.

Practice

Three things that go wrong with paper registers

The register and the receipts disagree. Almost always because a visit was recorded in one and not the other — a consultation waived at the desk, a patient sent straight to a doctor without passing the register. Totalling both at the end of every day, rather than at month-end, is what catches it while anyone still remembers the patient.

Follow-ups get recorded as new visits. Not usually dishonesty — just no written rule about what counts as a follow-up. Fix the window, put it on the wall above the desk, and the column becomes reliable within a week.

If you are weighing when to move any of this off paper, how small hospitals digitise without the chaos sets out a staged order.

The MR number gets re-issued. A patient who cannot produce their old card gets a new number, and one person's history splits across two or three files. Searching by phone number before issuing a new MR number prevents most of it, which is also the reason the contact column sits early in this format rather than at the end.

Related templates and tools

In Trisvio

The register, kept by the software that raises the bill

When registration and billing are the same record, the register and the receipts cannot disagree — a visit either exists with a charge against it or it was waived by someone, with a name and a reason. The daily OPD list is then a report, not a book to reconcile.

See OPD management Request a demo

Looking for the statutory registers instead — births, deaths, Form F? See the compliance guides.