Case Study · Hospitals & Healthcare
Premium service contracts that are never held to their terms
Hospitals pay premium rates for guaranteed response times on equipment that cannot go down. Yet in most networks nobody reconciles vendor performance against the contracted terms, and credits for missed SLAs go unclaimed year after year.
The problem
A hospital is in essence a mini city. Beyond the MRI machines, CT scanners, and lab equipment worth millions each, it runs its own power, water, HVAC, sterilisation, and transport systems, every piece under its own warranty or service contract with its own terms.
Downtime here is not just lost revenue. A scanner offline means delayed diagnoses and rescheduled procedures. A failed air handler can shut theatres. The risk lands on patients, which is exactly why hospitals pay premium rates for guaranteed response times.
Yet every department renews at the highest tier by default, because nobody can quantify the risk of stepping down, and when vendors miss their response targets the miss is rarely documented in a way that supports a credit claim. The guarantees hospitals pay for are effectively unenforced.
Vertical transport runs on the same kind of contract, checked just as rarely. One hospital group finally checked a routine elevator invoice against its contract: one technician, one visit, two units, but two separate trip charges, plus a lubrication service already included in the annual price. Industry audits put charges like this on nearly four in every ten elevator invoices. Nobody had been checking.
What Canary changes
Canary tracks vendor response and resolution times against each contract's SLA terms, across clinical equipment and building plant alike, documenting every miss with the evidence needed to claim the credit.
Coverage tiers are assessed against each asset's actual failure history and clinical criticality, separating the machines where downtime endangers patients, and premium response is worth every dollar, from the equipment renewed at the top tier out of habit.
Purchases arrive on purchase orders. Canary checks the invoice against the order, the delivery record, and the service contract at once, so a charge for beds, parts, or service can match its paperwork perfectly and still get caught when the contract already funds it, along with the tax line behind it.
The same line-by-line check runs on vertical transport: two trip charges for one technician's single visit, or a lubrication service the annual contract already covers, gets flagged before the payment run, not discovered months later.