NABH 6th edition: what your hospital ERP must actually do

NABH 6th edition defines 10 chapters and 651 objective elements. Most hospital software covers registration and billing and calls it "NABH-compliant." That claim doesn't survive the first assessor visit.

Here's what an ERP actually needs to do for NABH — not in theory, but in the workflows assessors inspect.

Access, Assessment and Continuity (AAC) requires documented consent at registration, a structured assessment at every visit, a care plan for inpatients, and a discharge summary that follows the NABH format. Your ERP must capture these as part of the clinical flow, not as a separate documentation exercise.

Care of Patients (COP) requires nursing charts, medication administration records (eMAR), surgical safety checklists per WHO protocol, and transfer documentation. If your nurses chart on paper and your OT has no checklist in the system, COP fails.

Management of Medication (MOM) requires a drug formulary, Schedule H/H1/X recording at dispensing, narcotics register per NDPS Act 1985, near-expiry alerts and drug-interaction checks. Pharmacy software that only tracks stock doesn't cover MOM.

Quality indicators — readmission rate, surgical-site infection rate, medication-error rate, falls, ICU mortality, critical-value notification turnaround — must be computed from live data, not assembled from registers before the assessment.

The pattern is clear: NABH compliance is not a checkbox your vendor claims. It's a daily data trail your system either produces or doesn't. If it doesn't, you're assembling evidence folders at 2 AM before the assessor arrives.