Printing for clinics and doctors: what you actually need

What to order

Most medical practices need the same handful of things, in roughly this order of usefulness.

• Appointment cards patients keep in a wallet for weeks
• Prescription pads and letterheads with registration numbers
• Waiting-room signage

The constraint to design around

Registration numbers, qualifications and clinic timings all have to fit and stay readable. Small type on a busy background is a genuine problem when the reader is elderly.

The mistake that costs most

Setting contact details below 7pt to fit everything. If a patient has to squint, the card has failed at its only job.

It is worth an extra week of planning to avoid, because the alternative is paying twice.

Lead times to plan around

Print is not instant, and the difference between products is larger than most people expect. Cards and flyers turn around in two to three working days; apparel and ceramics take five or more because each piece is handled individually.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India, so the only thing distance costs you is time — two days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands.

Claiming the GST back

All of this is a business expense, and the GST on it is claimable as input credit provided the invoice carries your GSTIN and the correct HSN per line.

Enter your GSTIN at checkout rather than asking for an amended invoice later — amending an issued invoice is considerably more trouble than typing fifteen characters.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Standard Visiting Cards — 89 × 51 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2 per unit with a minimum of 100.
• Letterheads — 210 × 297 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹4 per unit with a minimum of 100.
• Posters — 297 × 420 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 200 DPI minimum, from ₹45 per unit with a minimum of 10.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

Getting the artwork right first time

The files medical practices send fail for the same handful of reasons as everyone else: no bleed on a design that runs to the edge, a logo pulled from a website at screen resolution, or text sitting a millimetre from the cut line.

All three are caught automatically before anything reaches a press, so the cost is a day rather than a reprint. The single best thing you can do in advance is get your logo as a vector file — PDF, AI, EPS or SVG — because that removes the resolution problem permanently, at every size you will ever print it.

Common questions