OnCo
ideasIdea

Pay for radiotherapy machine uptime, not for the machine

Governments and donors should buy guaranteed working hours from radiotherapy vendors, with remote monitoring and regional spare-parts depots, instead of buying machines that then sit broken.

Radiotherapy machines in low- and middle-income countries are frequently non-operational for months awaiting a part or a visiting engineer. A regional shared-service model would bundle continuous remote diagnostics, an in-region spare-parts depot, and locally trained engineers into a multi-country service contract with penalties for downtime. Vendors already run remote monitoring in high-income markets; the change is contractual, not technical.

Hypothesis
Uptime-linked service contracts covering a regional cluster of at least ten machines will raise annual scheduled-hours delivered by at least 30% within two years compared with machines under standard warranty terms.
Rationale
Availability-based contracting transformed aircraft-engine and hospital-imaging maintenance economics. Concentrating demand across countries makes an in-region engineer and parts depot affordable.
What would test it
A donor-backed pilot across one region (e.g., East Africa) comparing uptime, mean time to repair, and patients treated per machine between contracted and non-contracted sites, reported quarterly and published.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
policy
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

5top

Pages like this

not linked directly; found by shared links