Beyond the price of a test: Building sustainable diagnostic networks through lifecycle procurement
Across global health, diagnostics are becoming more advanced, connected, and decentralized. Despite these innovations, many country programs still face a familiar challenge: managing the operational systems required to keep diagnostic networks running consistently over time. While new diagnostic deployments bring their own complexities, the challenge can be even greater when countries are working to sustain existing diagnostic networks, where maintaining equipment uptime, securing consumables, managing service agreements, supporting connectivity, and funding ongoing operations are critical to long-term performance.
Increasingly, countries and partners must manage an interconnected ecosystem of reagents, consumables, maintenance, servicing, software, connectivity, training, freight, forecasting, and technical support. This often extends beyond managing products alone to coordinating supplier relationships, negotiating service agreements, monitoring performance commitments, and ensuring long-term operational support across multiple vendors.
When fragmentation affects diagnostic network performance
When operational components are managed separately, fragmentation can emerge across the diagnostic value chain. The consequences are often predictable:
- Equipment may arrive before sites are ready.
- Consumables may be delayed.
- Maintenance agreements may be unclear.
- Connectivity systems may not integrate properly.
- Forecasting assumptions may shift faster than procurement cycles can adapt.
- Long-term operational costs may be underestimated during planning, creating funding gaps that can affect service continuity over time.
The result is that diagnostics capable of transforming patient care can struggle to achieve their full impact if the systems supporting them are not equally coordinated.
Lifecycle procurement drives predictability and control
For diagnostics, lifecycle procurement refers to approaches that consider not only the acquisition of products, but also the services, maintenance, connectivity, consumables, logistics, forecasting, and support required to keep diagnostic networks functioning over time.
For organizations supporting diagnostic procurement, this shift is not only about securing products at the right price. It is also about understanding how products, services, suppliers, contracts, logistics, data requirements, and long-term operational support fit together across the full diagnostic lifecycle.
Lifecycle procurement approaches can help strengthen continuity, improve predictability, support more sustainable diagnostic networks over time, and help countries maximize existing diagnostic investments through improved equipment uptime, service continuity, forecasting accuracy, and long-term network performance.
Across global health supply chains, procurement and implementation partners are increasingly supporting lifecycle-oriented contracting and service delivery models. These models can cover reagents and consumables, equipment placement, maintenance, training, logistics coordination, connectivity, forecasting, and long-term support.
These models can offer important benefits, but they are also complex to design and implement. Programs must consider supplier responsibilities, data-sharing requirements, service expectations, accountability mechanisms, existing installed equipment, country readiness, and how costs and responsibilities flow across different partners. This is where procurement and supply chain expertise can help reduce complexity and support more informed decision-making.
PFSCM's track record supporting diverse procurement models
Through its category management approach, the Partnership for Supply Chain Management (PFSCM) supports a wide range of health products and procurement and supply chain models tailored to the operational needs of each program. This can range from purchasing and delivering diagnostic tests to supporting all-inclusive pricing (AIP) contracting for diagnostic analyzers and coordinating complex project-based deployments.
Over two decades, PFSCM has supported clients across a wide range of procurement and supply chain approaches. Through strategic sourcing, supplier engagement, contracting, and supply chain management, PFSCM has established and managed framework agreements, long-term supply contracts, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and all-inclusive pricing agreements.
As diagnostic technologies become increasingly connected and decentralized, procurement strategies are also evolving beyond standalone product purchasing toward lifecycle-oriented approaches that consider equipment, consumables, service delivery, connectivity, reporting, and long-term operational support together. Across multiple country programs, these lifecycle-oriented approaches are increasingly shaping how diagnostic networks are deployed, managed, and sustained over time.
Working with more than 300 international and regional suppliers, PFSCM helps clients identify procurement and supply chain solutions that align with their operational needs, funding environments, market conditions, and health system priorities.
Aligning these elements more closely, lifecycle procurement approaches can help strengthen continuity, improve predictability, support more sustainable diagnostic networks over time, and help countries maximize existing diagnostic investments through improved equipment uptime, service continuity, forecasting accuracy, and long-term network performance.
Strengthening diagnostic networks for the long term
Sustainable diagnostic networks require more than the right products at the right price. They require coordinated procurement strategies that account for the full lifecycle — from sourcing and contracting to maintenance, consumables, connectivity, and long-term operational support.
PFSCM brings over 20 years of experience supporting governments, donors, and global health partners across diverse procurement and supply chain models. Whether you are deploying new diagnostic capacity or sustaining an existing network, PFSCM can help you design and implement the supply chain approach that best fits your program's needs.
