Transcript

The Tell in a LINAC Service Contract: Same Rate on a New Machine and a Twenty-Year-Old One · Medsolve Dynamics

Yoel Bakas: Open your Radiation Oncology service contract and find the service rate. Now, picture that same rate on a 20 year old machine. Do you notice that it's usually the same number? I spent 20 years on the vendor side setting those rates. So let me tell you what that means. More specifically, what that sameness means. A one year old Linac and a 20 year old Linux. Do not cost the same to service. Different parts, different failure rates, different labor. If the price is identical, it was never built from what it costs to actually service that machine. It was built instead to anchor you. A flat percentage off list is not a cost calculation. It's a number designed to feel standard so no one asks where it came from. But here's the thing: an anchor has no defense until you make it prove it is tied to the cost. So the next conversation: ask the vendor to show you the service price against the actual cost to service that machine. And that whole number changes. That's not asking for a discount, that's asking for the price. To justify itself. We reopened exactly this kind of number on a radiation oncology joint venture. The results were stunning. And it was part of turning a 17 year payback into an under three year ROI. That is the work that we will work through on the AMAC summer session in July. A price with no link to what it costs to actually service the machine is not a price. It's an anchor.