Calling for Help: Using Outside Parties for Equipment Servicing

From time to time, you may need to reexamine your servicing arrangements and decide whether your equipment service should be performed by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), a third party such as an independent service organization (ISO), or in-house personnel.1 This decision may apply to a single device, the facility’s entire equipment inventory, or a health system’s equipment at multiple facilities. To reach the best decisions, clinical engineering managers and others responsible for service must understand the options and their ramifications.

In this article, we examine the option of having either the manufacturer or a third-party servicer do the work. This follows up our June 2010 discussion of using hospital technicians for this task (“At Your Service: The Ins and Outs of Servicing Equipment In-House”). In a future article, we’ll look at all three options side by side.

Certain factors will hold true when you’re using any outside party to service...