Buying clinical AI has become routine. Removing it has not, and a wave of procurement language now emerging suggests that health systems have learned this the hard way.
The scenarios driving the change are unglamorous: a vendor acquired and the product sunset, a model that failed local validation after a population shift, a contract that lapsed while three years of model outputs sat inside the vendor's environment. In each case the question is the same — what does the health system still hold when the relationship ends?
New contract templates circulating among purchasing collaboratives specify output archival in a documented format, return or destruction of training-derived artifacts, a minimum notice period before sunset, and a requirement that the system be able to disable the model without vendor action. That last clause has been the most contested.
The clause procurement officers describe as most useful is also the simplest: a written record of every clinical decision the model contributed to, retained by the health system, in a format readable without the vendor's software. Several systems discovered they did not have this only when they tried to leave.
