A development agreement is a contract that specifies what a business will provide in exchange for something of value from another party. This is a common type of contract in commercial construction projects, where the company builds the property or structure in exchange for payment and/or co-ownership of the project. Department of real estate license training courses like the development agreement schools in Riverside County California teach aspiring real estate developers about this aspect of commercial real estate agreements. In the context of medical and health education, a development agreement is a contract that lays out a framework for the services that a certain entity will provide to the school to carry out its curriculum. For example, one medical school had a development agreement with another entity to provide educational content to the school. The content provider made its staff of licensed doctors available to have regular virtual meetings with students, providing online videos of material relating to the videos that could be used as an instructional tool. Such an agreement allowed the medical school to make use of the content provider’s staff while also providing its students with an opportunity to have a broader range of instructors, thus offering the students more knowledge and skills that they can use in their careers down the line. Rather than putting one particular department in charge of one hour of instruction, the business model established by the development agreement made it possible for students to learn in a more diverse fashion.
A development agreement can be so beneficial for a medical education institution, but it can also have a negative impact. If one party is not paying sufficient attention to the development agreement, or if the other party is not complying with the terms of the agreement, a variety of problems could surface. One possibility is that the two entities disagree about how the material is being delivered or whether the material is in legal compliance, however they may have different perspectives on whether it is compliant. To use the example of the medical education agreement above, the medical school might believe that the content provided by the content provider is not complete or accurate-for instance, if the instructional videos contain a lot of outdated information. On the other side of the table, the content provider might argue that the material being taught by the medical school itself is outdated, or that the content fails to comply with the accreditation requirements set out by the various agencies governing medical education programs. The development agreement itself often sets out rules relating to how to resolve disputes that arise between the two parties, so it is important that the agreement be very clear as to what happens if one of the parties alleges that the other side is deviating from the terms of the agreement. In many cases, the agreement will require that one or both parties exert a good-faith effort to resolve the dispute outside of a legal setting. It should also set out whether the parties are required to go through mediation of the parties submit the dispute to an arbitrator who will make a final and binding decision on the matter.
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