Biomedical Equipment Assessment and Management (BEAM) is an Advanced Informatics in Medicine (AIM) project designed to establish a solid inter-European system for the effective management and assessment of biomedical technology. The system exploits the enormous amount of information produced continuously in different countries, accesses and retrieves it from local and remote databases, introduces new standards and tools for the management of medical standards and tools for the management of medical equipment in the hospital environment, provides communication means between clinical engineers and promotes quality assurance.