Twelve questions to ask in every IVF software demo.

Because a demo is a performance, and every performer chooses their best material. The dashboard is always beautiful; the edge cases — a split cycle, a donor gamete, a straw frozen under a previous numbering system — are always somewhere else. Your job on demo day is to move the session from their material to yours: a real cycle from your clinic, anonymised, walked from first consultation to β-hCG. Everything below assumes that format. If a vendor resists it, that's your first data point.

The lab (questions 1–5)

1. "Show me a vitrification, start to finish." You're watching for enforced double witnessing — a recorded second person, not an optional comment box — and a printed label at the end.
2. "Find this straw." Give them a hypothetical: an embryo frozen four years ago. The answer must be a navigable tank map — cryocan, canister, goblet, cryolock — in seconds.
3. "Grade a D5 embryo, with the photo." Day-wise grading should attach the image beside the grade, per embryo. Ask where the photo lives five years later.
4. "Where does andrology live?" Semen analysis deserves the same structure as embryology — if it's a free-text notes field, half the lab is undocumented.
5. "Generate today's Form F." From scans entered during the demo, live. Form F assembled at month-end by hand is the process that fails inspections.

The clinic around the lab (6–8)

6. "Where does the front desk see tomorrow's injections?" Cycles are carried by reminder calls. Lab schedules should surface as front-desk worklists with call outcomes recorded — this is where lab-to-desk integration shows.
7. "Bill this cycle the way our patients pay." Part-payments across months, an EMI schedule, a post-dated cheque. Watch the receipts print. (₹-native billing is where imported systems struggle.)
8. "A cycle succeeds — show me her ANC record." The maternity handoff should reuse the same patient record, not start a new registration.

Trust (9–11)

9. "Export our data, now." Excel/PDF exports demonstrated, plus a plain-English answer to "what happens if we leave you?" It's your data — the answer should say so.
10. "Where does the database live, and what happened to it last night?" On-premise or cloud should be your choice; either way, an automatic off-site backup should already exist by morning.
11. "Whose name do patients see?" If white-label matters to your brand, verify it covers screens and printed documents — letterheads, receipts, consents in the languages your patients read.

Honesty (12)

12. "Tell us two things the software does not do." Every real product has an honest answer (ours: no lab-analyzer integration, no pharmacy inventory, no mobile app — today). A vendor who can't name one is describing the roadmap, not the product.

One sheet, twelve rows, three possible marks per row: shown live, claimed (described but not demonstrated), dodged. Only "shown live" scores. (We've turned this into a printable buyer's checklist you can carry into any demo.) After two or three demos, the sheet makes the decision surprisingly obvious — and it protects you from the most persuasive salesperson winning over the most complete product. Pair the sheet with the shortlist from our IVF software comparison, and with the cost guide when quotes arrive.

• Future tense — "that's coming next quarter" — for anything on your critical list.
• A rehearsed cycle only; reluctance to enter your case live.
• Witnessing, audits or exports described as "available on request" rather than shown.
• No straight answer on data export and exit.
• Pricing that can't be put in writing across 3–5 years (licence, AMC, migration, training).

None of these makes a vendor evil — but each one moves risk from their side of the table to yours. When you're ready to run this script for real, MedStream's demo is thirty minutes on your own workflows, and question 12 gets answered before you ask it. For the wider context around demo day — modules, deployment, compliance, cost — the complete HMS guide covers the whole journey.