skills/define-healthcare-service/SKILL.md

---
name: define-healthcare-service
description: Scope a U.S. healthcare service feasibility study or practice expansion, establish its assumptions, and coordinate demand, payment, operations, financial, and pilot planning. Use for a full feasibility request or an unclear service concept.
---

# Define a healthcare service

Read [working rules](../../references/working-rules.md). Use the information already supplied before asking questions.

Establish the decision, service, geography, delivery setting, clinician roles, payer scope, planning year, existing-practice versus standalone context, and investment or access objectives. Ask the most consequential missing questions together. Do useful preliminary work while uncertain inputs remain clearly marked.

Create a one-page service definition and [assumption register](../../assets/assumption-register.csv). Define annual unique patients, episodes, visits, and active census separately. Identify resources already available and what capacity they can absorb. Separate a clinic's economics from those of an outside implementation/service company. A public-health access objective may require an explicit subsidy scenario rather than an assumed profit objective.

For a full study, follow the applicable workflow references in order; do not require the user to invoke six skills individually:

1. [Assess demand](../assess-healthcare-demand/SKILL.md): demographics, alternatives, referral access, reachable activity.
2. [Plan payment assumptions](../plan-healthcare-payment/SKILL.md): official-resource guidance and amount provenance.
3. [Design operations](../design-healthcare-operations/SKILL.md): capacity, service patterns, labor, equipment, routes/rooms.
4. [Model finances](../model-healthcare-finances/SKILL.md): unit economics, constrained activity, cash and scenarios.
5. [Decide and pilot](../plan-healthcare-pilot/SKILL.md): recommendation, validation priorities, implementation conditions.

Read only the references needed for a narrower request. When mobile wound care is the user's service, consult the [worked example](../../references/mobile-care-example.md) for method, never as local market or clinical evidence. Write the executive recommendation after the analysis using the [decision brief](../../assets/decision-brief.md). Deliver preliminary findings even if a missing input prevents a final recommendation, and state which input would change the decision.