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- Sep 20, 2004
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I get it. But like you said, talk is cheap, and it's not clear to me that the company did the proforma necessary to make sure their tech was financially viable in the long term i guess the replan charges were supposed to be the difference, but that seems kinda nebulous imoI don't think that's what he was saying -
Now, @TheWallnerus can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that if you took every department that had a Viewray machine, which was what, 50-55?
So you have those 50-55 sites each just pay the equivalent of a 1.0 FTE RadOnc physician salary/compensation package, that would have been enough money to get them out of bankruptcy.
With these high CapEx ventures, which basically every company selling a radiation machine is, you are banking on the service contract as your LTV because you only sell a machine to a department once every 10-15 years if you're lucky.
I don't know what the service contract with Viewray was (and obviously it was not enough), but rather than hoping angels would swoop in during Chapter 11 and save the company, an alternative strategy would have been to have each existing site pay the equivalent of a 1.0 RadOnc package.
Then, the company wouldn't have died, and really, on an institutional level, that would have been a drop in the bucket investment for each site that was able to pay for a machine and keep it going.
Basically - these letters and social media posts are nice, but words ain't cash.
It's sad, given the promise of MRI, but this is the environment we are in. Data free interventions that cost more than the current standard aren't going to cut it long term unless you've got great lobbyists