Service Level Agreement

Agreement Overview

Version 1.1

This Agreement represents a Service Level Agreement (“SLA” or “Agreement”) between Medical Web Experts (“COMPANY”) and its clients (“CLIENT”) for the provisioning of hosting services required to support and sustain a hosted website, hosted software, custom product or custom software development.

This Agreement remains valid until superseded by a revised agreement mutually endorsed by the stakeholders.


Goals & Objectives

The purpose of this Agreement is to ensure that the proper elements and commitments are in place to provide consistent IT service support and delivery to the CLIENT by the COMPANY.

The objectives of this Agreement are to:

  • Provide clear reference to service ownership, accountability, roles and/or responsibilities
  • Present a clear, concise and measurable description of service provision to the CLIENT
  • Match perceptions of expected service provision with actual service support & delivery

Service Agreement

The following detailed service parameters are the responsibility of the COMPANY in the ongoing support of this Agreement.

Service Scope

The following Services are included in this Agreement:

  • Manned telephone support
  • Monitored email support
  • Support desk / ticket system

The following products/services are covered by this Agreement:

  • MWE Basic and Professional Hosting platform service commitment
  • MWE Enterprise Hosting platform service commitment
  • MWE Custom Hosting platform service commitment

Responsibilities

Company responsibilities

  • ensure the relevant Product and Professional Services are available to Client in accordance with the Uptime guarantee;
  • respond to support requests within the timescales listed below
  • take steps to escalate, diagnose, and resolve issues in an appropriate and timely manner, including the allocation of a sufficient number of skilled staff and the collection of necessary information; and
  • maintain clear and timely communication with Client at all times.

Client responsibilities

  • Use the Product as intended under the Agreement;
  • Notify the Company of issues or problems in a timely manner and as thoroughly as is possible;
  • Cooperate with the Company in its efforts to escalate, diagnose, and resolve issues by providing timely and accurate responses to requests for information;
  • In case of an A-Priority Alert, ensure the availability of a sufficient number of skilled Client employees to cooperate with the Company;
  • Provide the Company with access to equipment, software, and services for the purposes of maintenance, updates, and fault prevention; and
  • Maintain staff with adequate information technology knowledge to fulfill these responsibilities.

Availability

MWE Enterprise Hosting

The Company guarantees 99.5% Uptime each month 24 hours a day 7 days a week (“Agreed Hours of Service”). Uptime is measured based on the monthly average of availability, rounded down to the nearest minute, and calculated as follows:

Uptime % = ((Agreed Hours of Service – hours of Downtime) / Agreed Hours of Service) * 100 %

MWE Basic and Professional Hosting

The Company guarantees 99% Uptime each month 24 hours a day 7 days a week (“Agreed Hours of Service”). Uptime is measured based on the monthly average of availability, rounded down to the nearest minute, and calculated as follows:

Uptime % = ((Agreed Hours of Service – hours of Downtime) / Agreed Hours of Service) * 100 %

MWE Custom Hosting

The company agrees a SLA under the contract with the client because custom hosting may vary the level of access and inference that the company specialists can have over the platform.

Exceptions

CLIENT shall not receive any credit under the SLA in connection with any failure or deficiency of website or email availability caused by or associated with:

  1. Circumstances beyond COMPANY’s reasonable control, including, without limitation, acts of any governmental body, war, insurrection, sabotage, armed conflict, embargo, fire, flood, strike or other labor disturbance, interruption of or delay in transportation, unavailability of or interruption or delay in telecommunications or third party services, virus attacks or hackers, failure of third party software (including, without limitation, e-commerce software, payment gateways, chat, statistics or free scripts) or inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, or power used in or equipment needed for provision of this SLA;
  2. Scheduled maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades (Note: Every effort will be made to keep downtime to a minimum during maintenance periods and, when possible, COMPANY will notify CLIENT in advance of the expected downtime. CLIENT will not be billed hourly for these maintenance periods, but these maintenance periods are not eligible for SLA credits);
  3. DNS issues outside the direct control of COMPANY;
  4. CLIENT’s acts or omissions (including acts or omissions of others engaged or authorized by the CLIENT), including, without limitation, custom scripting or coding (e.g., CGI, Perl, HTML, ASP, etc), any negligence, willful misconduct, or use of the Services in breach of this Agreement;
  5. DNS (Domain Name Server) Propagation;
  6. Outages elsewhere on the Internet that hinder access to your account. COMPANY is not responsible for browser or DNS caching that may make your site appear inaccessible when others can still access it. COMPANY will guarantee only those areas considered under the control of COMPANY.
  7. Issues with email Client configuration or performance

Service Credits

Should uptime fall below the SLA agreed above  in any calendar month, The company will pay liquidated damages in the form of Service Credits, which are calculated as follows:

To apply for a Service Credit under this SLA, Client must submit a request to your Support contact by email, within 30 days of the end of the applicable month with the subject line “SLA Service Credit”. The request must include the dates and times of the Downtime for which Service Credit is being requested, and any additional documentation that demonstrates the claimed Downtime. Service Credits are the exclusive remedy for the company’s failure to meet its Uptime guarantee and no other or additional types of damages can be claimed, including breach of warranty. In the event there are no new invoices to be issued, the company will pay out the Service Credit to Client directly.

Support Availability

  • Regular business hours are considered to be from 9.00 am until 5.00 pm Eastern Standard Time, Monday to Friday, except Federal U.S. Holidays and observances as defined by the U.S. Government.
  • Telephone support: will be conducted during business hours.
  • Email support: will be monitored during business hours. Any email received outside office hours will be collected, and best efforts will be made to respond to client’s request. However no action will be guaranteed until the next working day.
  • Support desk / ticket system: Clients provided this option are encouraged to submit a ticket, no matter if during or after office hours, via the support desk.

Emergency Situation

  1. Any work performed or calls handled outside regular business hours will be considered an emergency and billed accordingly.
  2. Services that are in need of an immediate resolution, including but not limited to server failure, software failure, e-PHI risk, that are not related to an existing project or approved work/change order, may be completed without CLIENT’s approval.
  3. CLIENT will be provided with an emergency email address and phone number, which will be forwarded to multiple parties in COMPANY’s organization.

CLIENT will be promptly notified in the event of this situation, and the COMPANY will make a best effort to identify such circumstances in order to ensure the best possible service.

Service Requests

In support of services outlined in this Agreement, the COMPANY will respond to service related incidents and/or requests submitted by the CLIENT within the following time frames. Resolution times are subject to the complexity and nature of the service request. Once responded to, COMPANY will make a best effort to resolve any outstanding issue(s) as quickly as possible, including performing such resolution outside of business hours.

ClassificationDescriptionResponse Time*
Critical Critical Business Impact-Problem or issue that renders your website or application unusable (ie: offline) < 1 hour (during business hours)
< 3 hours (during non-business hours)
High Significant Business Impact-Problem or issue that DOES impact the operation of your website, application or email but DOES NOT render it unusable (i.e. slow server response time). < 3 hours (during business hours)
< 6 hours (non business hours)
Low Minimal Business Impact-Problem or issue that DOES NOT impact the operation of your website, application or email (i.e. maintenance requests). < 24 hours (during business hours)

Remote assistance will be provided in-line with the above timescales dependent on the priority of the support request.

Support Escalation Policy

If the normal support process does not produce the desired results, or if the problem has changed in priority, the problem can be escalated as follows:

  • First contact the representative who is working on the problem and request that the priority of the problem is escalated.
  • You may contact a tier 2 manager if additional escalation is required.
  • You may contact a tier 3 manager if continued escalation is required.
  • If no support representatives are available in the event of an emergency issue, Client may escalate the issue in order of tiers.

Critical and Emergency Service Requests

Clients are instructed to initiate all critical and emergency support requests by contacting their account manager for the emergency email address.

Last updated: March 6, 2020

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