Re: Dosimetry

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 05:23 PM 2/11/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>I have yet to understand this logic.  So the vender provides a service;
>you pay a set rate for that serivice;  after so much time, you request
>1/3 the service.  How on god's green earth should someone charge you
>MORE for the service.  This concept doesn't fly in any other industry. 

I don't know why it might be more, but I know why it doesn't drop
proportionally with the number of dosimeters used per year to monitor an
individual.

A commercial operation has a certain amount of money invested in
dosimeters, and they expect to issue them out to customers and ultimately
make money off them. If one customer keeps a dosimeter for a month and
returns it, that dosimeter can be cycled back into the field perhap 4 times
a year, and money can be earned for it each time. A dosimeter worn for a
quarter might only go out twice, offering the vendor only 2 opportunites to
earn money. The cost of the dosimeter is the same in both cases. Also, the
number of readers required doesn't go down. The customers want the
processing results within some period of time after the end of the
monitoring period, no matter how long that period was. So processing a
batch of dosimeters within a period of days requires the same number of
reader regardless of whether the dosimeters were worn for a month or a
quarter. Similarly, staffing cannot be chopped if a customer switches from
monthly to quarterly - the number of people needed to get the dosimeters
ready for use and to process them upon return is independent of the wear
period.

Fixed costs like this turn the pricing structure into something that is not
straightforward and obvious in all cases.

You're welcome, Sandy.

Bob Flood
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
(650) 926-3793

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