AAMI Offers Devicemakers a Tool for Managing Service-Level Agreements

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation released a service-level agreement template to help original equipment manufacturers and healthcare providers improve their working relationships.

The tool can be used to create a custom contract to specify responsibilities for training, parts availability and service access.

The template suggests that the following items should be clarified before crafting a service-level contract: owners of the agreement; stakeholders; who will administer it; equipment lists; duration; scope of service; exclusions; availability of customer and service provider; types and depth of service required; quality and performance metrics expected; financial expectations; warranty expectations; who will mediate discrepancies; and expectations on termination of the agreement.

Service agreements should also cover service scope, including repair, preventive maintenance, incoming inspection/acceptance testing, incident investigations, software update, modification, network configuration, and remote diagnostics.

The free template is available at www.aami.org/SLAT.