Excuses are lies you dressed up in church clothes.
Picture this: your sales team just won a VA equipment order. Everybody gets a congratulatory email. Somebody asks who services the thing after the warranty expires, and your beautifully prepared federal strategy turns into, “Call Bob. He usually knows a guy.”
Bob is on a fishing trip. Apparently, so is your support plan.
That joke is funny until a piece of equipment stops working, a clinician needs it, and the facility discovers that the service promise never became an operating plan. The sale may be complete. The obligation is not.
The Sale Ends. The Obligation Does Not.
In May 2026, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewed how VA purchases maintenance for high tech medical equipment. The selected medical centers generally reported satisfaction with the maintenance services they received. The purchasing process still had problems.
GAO found inconsistent guidance about when agencywide contracts should be used, duplicated contracting work, and gaps in how some decisions were documented. In one case, a medical center paid more through a separate contract than it would have paid under an agencywide agreement. VA agreed with GAO's three recommendations to clarify guidance, reduce unnecessary duplication, and improve documentation.
That is not a story about broken equipment or people failing to care. It is a warning about the work surrounding the equipment. Even when service itself is satisfactory, purchasing it can still create friction, delay, and avoidable cost.
For a vendor, that matters before the proposal reaches the desk. If maintenance is vague, difficult to buy, or dependent on one person who knows which number to call, the product is carrying operational risk the sales deck forgot to mention.
“Call Bob” Is Not a Service Model
A credible VA offer should answer the service questions without sending the facility on a scavenger hunt.
Who owns maintenance after the warranty? Who can perform the repair? Which parts and labor are covered? What is the expected response time? What happens when the local technician cannot solve the problem? What does the service cost, and which purchasing path lets VA buy it without inventing a new process at every facility?
Those answers cannot live only in Bob's head. If they do, your company has a dependency with a tackle box.
Write the answers down. Price the obligation. Test the escalation path. Make sure the people promising the service have spoken to the people who must deliver it. Then ask whether a contracting officer, biomedical engineering team, service chief, and local program owner could understand the same plan without translating it four different ways.
Five Questions to Settle Before the Next Sale
1. Who owns the equipment after delivery?
Name the responsible team for installation, acceptance, training, preventive maintenance, repair, software updates, replacement parts, and end of life decisions. “The manufacturer handles it” is not enough if the manufacturer, distributor, service partner, and facility all have different assumptions.
2. How can VA buy the maintenance?
The service plan needs a real purchasing path. Determine whether maintenance is included, separately priced, available through an agencywide contract, or dependent on another vehicle. A great support promise is not useful if the facility cannot buy it cleanly.
3. What happens when the warranty ends?
Do not wait until month twelve to discover that the price, coverage, staffing, or contract vehicle changes in month thirteen. The customer should know what continues, what stops, and what decision must be made before coverage lapses.
4. How fast can the equipment return to service?
Response time sounds impressive in a proposal. Restoration time is what the facility feels. Define remote support, on site support, parts availability, loaner equipment, escalation, and the point at which repair becomes replacement.
5. What must the facility do?
Every support model asks something of the customer. It may require training, network access, local troubleshooting, environmental controls, inspection, documentation, or scheduling. If those responsibilities stay hidden until implementation, the service plan begins with friction.
Maintenance Belongs in the VA Growth Strategy
Veterans need equipment available for care. Clinicians need to trust it. Biomedical teams need clear service boundaries. Contracting teams need a usable way to buy what the equipment requires. Vendors need a support model that can survive the second site, the tenth site, and the day Bob finally decides the fish are biting too well to answer his phone.
This is why maintenance is not a footnote to market access. It affects readiness, pricing, purchasing, implementation, trust, references, and scale. Your next sale gets harder when the first facility remembers your response time more clearly than your product demonstration.
Manufacturers, what is the toughest service commitment your sales team has had to defend? VA contracting and biomedical teams, what should a vendor settle before the proposal ever reaches your desk?
JhetVet® helps medical device and health technology companies work through VA readiness, the purchasing path, pricing, support responsibilities, channel activation, and field execution. Bring us the device and the service offer. We will help map the path forward, identify where the promises outrun the plan, and build the operating answer before the equipment needs one.
See how JhetVet® supports medical device and health technology companies, review how we operate, or start the conversation.
