AMC and CMC contracts: what each one covers

What an AMC covers

An Annual Maintenance Contract buys engineering time. For a fixed annual fee you get the scheduled preventive visits written into the contract, attendance on breakdown calls, calibration where it applies, and the service documentation that goes with all of it.

Spare parts are not included. When a part fails it is quoted, approved and billed separately, usually at a contract rate below the list price. A hospital on an AMC has a predictable labour cost and a variable parts cost.

An AMC suits equipment that is still relatively new, equipment under warranty for parts but not for service, and departments where the equipment is not critical enough to justify the higher fee.

What a CMC covers

A Comprehensive Maintenance Contract covers everything an AMC covers and adds the cost of spare parts to the annual fee. When a covered part fails, it is replaced at no additional charge.

The annual fee is higher, and the equipment is inspected more carefully before the contract is written, because the vendor is now carrying the parts risk. In exchange the hospital gets one number in the budget for the year and no purchase approval to chase in the middle of a breakdown.

A CMC suits life-support equipment, imaging equipment, anything past its warranty period, and any institution where an unplanned capital request takes weeks to clear.

Side by side

Which one to choose

Equipment under five years old, non-critical. An AMC. Failure rates are low and paying the parts premium every year for a part that may never fail is not good value.

Life-support and imaging equipment, any age. A CMC. A ventilator blower, a monitor board or an imaging detector costs more than the difference in contract fee, and the approval time for that purchase is time the machine spends switched off.

Equipment past seven or eight years. A CMC, or a frank conversation about replacement. Failure rates rise, parts get harder to source, and an AMC on ageing equipment can produce a parts bill that exceeds what a CMC would have cost.

Mixed fleets. Both, on one contract. There is no rule that says every machine in a hospital has to sit under the same cover. We quote critical care on CMC and general wards on AMC more often than we quote either alone.

What neither contract covers

Naming these before a contract is signed prevents the argument that otherwise happens six months later.

• Consumables and patient-contact accessories: electrodes, sensors, cuffs, patient circuits,

filters, batteries, printer paper, reagents and laboratory glassware.

• Physical damage: impact, dropped equipment, liquid ingress, damage from an unstable supply

where no stabiliser or UPS is fitted.

• Misuse and unauthorised repair: equipment opened or worked on by anyone outside the contract.
• Cosmetic wear: casing, castors, upholstery and trolley surfaces, unless quoted separately.
• Obsolete parts that no longer exist in the market. We can source and adapt a great deal, but we

will not sign a contract implying we can supply a component that has not been manufactured in a decade.

Specific high-value assemblies (X-ray tubes, ultrasound and echo probes, laser tubes, imaging detectors) are usually excluded from a standard CMC or covered under a separate limit. If they are covered in your quotation, it says so; if they are excluded, it says that too.

How a contract is priced

Five things set the figure:

1. Equipment count and mix. Twenty infusion pumps and one CT scanner are not the same contract. 2. Age and condition at inspection. Assessed on site before quoting, not estimated from a list. 3. Criticality. Life-support equipment carries a tighter visit schedule and a faster call commitment, which costs more to staff. 4. Number of sites. One contract covering four units is priced differently from four contracts. 5. Parts risk, for CMC only. Driven by model, age, and the current availability of spares.

We inspect before we quote. A price given over the phone without seeing the equipment is a price that gets revised after the contract is signed, and we do not work that way.