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Choosing an effective plan for supporting a medical device is critical to its safe use, cost-effectiveness, and longevity. Hospitals can choose from a variety of support providers, including manufacturers, third-party service vendors, or hospital clinical engineering (CE) departments. However, if the hospital plans to use a third-party service vendor or its own CE department to provide support, the manufacturer's cooperation or assistance will still be needed to implement the support plan effectively. Over the years, ECRI has received many comments from hospitals about the way in which manufacturers respond to their equipment support needs. We have learned that some manufacturers are not willing to assist third-party service vendors or in-house service programs or do not always deliver the support they promise. Also, hospitals do not always consider their support needs before purchase, when they have the most leverage to negotiate flexible support arrangements. To help foster better equipment support and customer satisfaction, we polled manufacturers that have participated in recent Health Devices Evaluations to obtain detailed information about their policies toward manufacturers' contract, third-party, and in-house support. Ready access to this information will help hospitals evaluate whether manufacturers' support policies will meet their needs, and it will allow them to minimize problems by working with the manufacturer to negotiate optimal support arrangements during the purchase process. In this article, we briefly discuss the factors to consider when evaluating support alternatives and manufacturers' support policies. We also present the questions posed to each manufacturer on our Manufacturers' Support Policies Questionnaire, along with a summary of the responses that we received for each question.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
