Transcript

Why a One-Hour LINAC downtime Becomes a Three-Hour Day in Radiation Oncology · Medsolve Dynamics

Yoel Bakas: The LINAC goes down at 10 o'clock in the morning, and the part it needs ships tomorrow from a depot three states away. The field engineer who installs it covers six other sites. I know this because I built service coverage models on the vendor side. And let me tell you something. They're built around the vendor's cost, not your schedule. That's why a one hour fault or downtime becomes a three hour day. Eight patients stack up, the adaptive case runs long. The ⁓ never catches up. There's a name for what the patient feels. It's called time toxicity. And from the oncology literature, the hours the treatment takes from a patient's life is what that means. Your department also feels that gap. It's called lost throughput. And it's time you will not get back. The uptime percentage in your contract does not capture any of Because parts, lead time, and the engineer coverage are what actually decide how long you're down. And both of those were set to the vendors economics before you ever signed. We map where the day actually loses. We map downtime, we map the parts lead time, we map the coverage gaps against the actual throughput and the margin before a program tries to fix it with a bigger waiting room. The downtime was one hour. The coverage model decided it would cost you three.