By Steven Ford

Hospital and imaging center managers hold responsibility for many things that they can’t really control. Will the people you hire show up on time and do their jobs? Will your bosses have realistic expectations? What Medicare reimbursement policies will change next month? What new indignities will be forced upon you by private insurance carriers?

Success as a manager depends on mitigating the unknowns and having good luck. The topic of How to Get Good Luck will be addressed by others, but here are some guidelines to help, in some ways, to limit the things that can go wrong when you’re considering a maintenance contract on your CT or MR scanner.
1. You might not have much leeway in negotiating terms with a major equipment manufacturer, but there is leeway on the price. The best way to get a less-awful price on your service contract is to talk with colleagues who have similar equipment under contract. In general, newer CTs and MR systems are more reliable than the ones they are replacing, not less, even though they may have more features and capabilities.

2. The Start Date of the Warranty should be the date that everything is working 100%, not the date that it was placed in service. Frequently on complex equipment, at the time of installation there are details of one sort or another that are not complete. Maybe a coil is backordered, or some other feature or service was promised but not delivered. Don’t pay 100% for less than 100% of what was purchased. This includes services such as applications training.

3. Uptime guarantees are not that meaningful, but are worth inquiring about. Some manufacturers will include a provision for credit on the maintenance contract if the imaging device fails to achieve an uptime (excluding outside events such as power outages) of 97% or something similar. Modern MR scanners and similar devices easily achieve uptime far higher than that. The contract, if it contains an uptime warranty, usually excludes holidays and time allocated to planned maintenance. PM time might add up to three days a year, and consider that 3% of the days in a year is ten days. If your CT or MR is down for 13 working days, that’s very poor performance indeed. The uptime guarantee is better than nothing, but in some cases, it limits the liability of the vendor. It might be better than nothing, but if your MR is unusable for more than 13 days in a year, you could probably negotiate some compensation with the service provider anyways.

4. If the service agreement looks fishy, stop and find another vendor. I was once called by a clinic who had an MR service proposal that included the x-ray tube and also misidentified the model of the equipment. They specified certain parts that were covered that weren’t found on the MR, like the collimator. If management of the service provider shows that level of ignorance of detail, if there are repeated misspelled words and grammar errors, walk away quickly.

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