Service-Level Agreement Between Healthcare Organization And A Third Party

Service level agreement is an agreement between healthcare organization and a third party. It can either be a contract which has conditions within it or can be an obligation between the two parties. A service-level agreement is an agreement between two or more parties, where one is the customer and the others are service providers. It is necessary for any working relationship. Contract agreements need to be accepted from both the sides. If any single service is not agreed it is not SLA.

SLAs commonly include many components, from a definition of services to the termination of agreement. To ensure that SLAs are consistently met, these agreements are often designed with specific lines of demarcation and the parties involved are required to

It means that each service would actually require its own SLA with its own terms of service plus metrics negotiated on a case by case basis. Having meaningful service level agreements in place helps to define the services and the performance that is expected from third party service providers. In most cases, the penalties or rebates that accompany the SLA are more trouble than they are worth. The uptime, availability and performance of the service procured is far more valuable than the

Microsoft published different SLAs for different types of services – Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks and Microsoft SQL Azure – but Microsoft cloud services will guarantee at least a 99.95% uptime when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains . What this means is that your Dynamics ERP install needs to be installed twice (in two separate Azure nodes or containers) in order for Microsoft’s uptime guarantee to apply. Now this part is explained in three terms on their website: 1) Introduction which includes what is SLA and what services would be cover under this SLA. 2) General terms in which they have explained the definitions of some general words related to the SLAs and terms for Claims, Service Credits and Limitations. And 3) SLA details which covers the specified informations related to cloud computing’s service level expectations.

Now most important part of the SLA for cloud computing is as below:

"Maximum Available Minutes" is the total accumulated minutes during a billing month for all roles that have two or more instances deployed in different Update Domains.

"Downtime" is the total accumulated minutes that are part of Maximum Available Minutes that have no Role Instance Connectivity.

"Monthly Uptime Percentage" for Cloud Services is calculated as Maximum Available Minutes less Downtime divided by Maximum Available Minutes