{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__veterinary_medicine","archetype_slug":"deadweight_loss_reduction","domain_slug":"veterinary_medicine","title":"Conditional Release of Idle Veterinary Operating-Room Blocks","opportunity_summary":"Test whether clinically compatible cross-service reallocation of otherwise idle staffed operating-room blocks can reduce consequential waiting without weakening safety, emergency access, equity, or workload protections. The opportunity depends on a currently unsupported local hypothesis that usable idle time regularly overlaps with compatible queued demand.","adopter_authorizer":"A multi-service veterinary hospital, authorized jointly by hospital clinical governance, operating-room leadership, anesthesia leadership, scheduling operations, and the body overseeing animal welfare and access.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Reducing animal pain or deterioration, owner burden, and wasted staffed operating-room time could be meaningful, but the packet provides no evidence about how often the allocation wedge occurs or how large its consequences are."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Waiting services, owners, and hospital operations have plausible reasons to value improvement, but the sealed candidate contains no expressed demand, adoption inquiry, complaint data, or evidence that stakeholders regard block ownership as a priority problem."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Conditional release directly targets the proposed allocation constraint while preserving substantive clinical checks and could avoid adding capacity; this advantage is conditional on allocation, rather than staffing, equipment, recovery space, or emergency reserve, being the binding constraint."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The domain-specific compatibility and safety framing is coherent, but prior art is explicitly unsearched and no basis is supplied for believing conditional block release is distinctive within veterinary or adjacent operating-room scheduling."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"The intervention is a bounded scheduling-rule and queue change using observable timestamps, compatibility screens, monitoring, and rollback rather than new clinical technology. Local system integration, data quality, and workflow effort remain unknown."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The relevant authorizers and protected interests are explicitly identified, but adoption requires agreement across clinical governance, OR, anesthesia, scheduling, welfare, and access functions, with no evidence that they will approve or coordinate the change."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The proposal specifies measurable states, rival explanations, separate problem and intervention falsifiers, an eight-to-twelve-week audit, and safety outcomes. It lacks local audit results, fixed thresholds, and comparative outcome evidence."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":3,"rationale":"The design preserves clinical compatibility, emergency reserves, and rollback while seeking faster care, but benefits for lower-income, rare-species, or otherwise disadvantaged cases are unmeasured and revenue-priority displacement is an explicit risk."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"A scheduling-rule intervention could be replicated without major physical expansion, but compatibility criteria, case mix, staffing, information systems, emergency demand, and governance are likely hospital-specific and no multi-site evidence is supplied."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Audit eight to twelve weeks of de-identified scheduling records, define prospective clinical-usability criteria, reconstruct compatible queues, compare releasable idle time with delayed demand, and report falsifier results.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Required timestamps and cancellation, staffing, queue, and usability fields already exist and can be accessed internally.","The work is limited to one multi-service hospital and does not include live reallocation.","Clinical reviewers must contribute paid time to classify compatibility and validate reasons slots were unusable."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"If the audit supports proceeding, design and configure a small elective-block pilot, preregister release and priority rules, establish consent and governance processes, train staff, and implement monitoring and rollback controls.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Existing scheduling software can be configured without replacement.","No major construction, clinical equipment purchase, or additional permanent capacity is required.","The estimate includes clinical, scheduling, analytics, compliance, and change-management labor."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Run and evaluate one bounded scheduling cycle across a small set of elective blocks, including screening, coordination, safety surveillance, access analysis, overtime tracking, incident review, and restoration capability.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Safety, consent, infection-control, staffing, anesthesia, and recovery requirements remain unchanged.","The pilot is confined to compatible elective cases and preserves emergency reserves.","Evaluation must compare outcomes with the prior block-rule baseline or a contemporaneous eligible-block comparison."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Maintain cross-service scheduling operations, compatibility review, system support, staff training, safety and equity monitoring, periodic audits, governance review, and rule adjustment at one hospital.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The intervention becomes an ongoing hospital process after separate authorization.","Recurring work is partly absorbed by existing personnel but is counted at resource-equivalent labor cost.","No evidence is available about transaction volume, automation, or additional staffing needs."]}},"research_burden":"MODERATE","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"The candidate defines a recognizable and observable problem—clinically usable staffed OR time remaining idle while compatible cases wait—and distinguishes it from total capacity scarcity, although local prevalence remains unverified."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The adopting hospital and the required joint authorities in clinical governance, OR leadership, anesthesia, scheduling, animal welfare, and access oversight are explicitly identified."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal makes a separable claim that conditional cross-service release, within unchanged clinical constraints, will reduce compatible waiting and unused staffed time relative to fixed late-release blocks without exceeding specified harm bounds."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"An eight-to-twelve-week de-identified scheduling audit is bounded, non-deploying, and decision-relevant; it can falsify the opportunity if clinically usable idle time does not meaningfully overlap with compatible delayed cases."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The sealed candidate preserves surgeon, anesthesia, consent, infection-control, recovery, staffing, and emergency requirements; names joint authority; excludes unsafe reallocations; and provides pause and rollback triggers. Actual authorization is still required before any pilot."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The candidate bounds a possible pilot but supplies no local information about scheduling-system changes, analytic capacity, compliance workload, training, or staffing, so implementation resource requirements cannot be supported from the sealed evidence."}},"blocking_evidence":["Whether prospectively defined clinical-usability criteria reveal meaningful recurring overlap between releasable staffed OR time and compatible queued cases with consequential delay.","Whether apparent waits are instead explained by anesthesia, recovery beds, equipment, staffing, owner availability, or necessary emergency reserve.","Locally authorized release deadlines, compatibility rules, priority hierarchy, emergency-access bound, safety and equity thresholds, attribution procedure, and restart authority.","Whether required scheduling-system changes and ongoing screening and monitoring workloads fit local staffing and resource constraints."],"next_evidence_step":"Conduct a retrospective audit of eight to twelve consecutive weeks at one hospital using preregistered clinical-usability and compatibility criteria. Compare fixed-block baseline records with a counterfactual eligible-release analysis of unused staffed minutes and compatible queued cases; stop further development if there is no meaningful recurring overlap or if non-allocation constraints explain the waits. Do not reallocate live cases in this step.","research_questions":["How many nominally idle staffed OR minutes remain usable after accounting for emergency reserve, species, contamination risk, equipment, personnel, anesthesia, recovery capacity, consent, and owner availability?","How often do those usable intervals overlap with compatible queued cases experiencing clinically consequential delay?","What proportion of delay is attributable to service ownership and release timing rather than true capacity or coordination constraints?","What release deadline and clinical priority hierarchy could improve allocation without encouraging hoarding, urgency inflation, or revenue-based prioritization?","Which safety, emergency-access, overtime, cancellation, and equity bounds would governance require before a pilot?","Can existing scheduling systems support auditable cross-service offers, acceptance decisions, reasons for rejection, and rapid rollback?","What baseline or contemporaneous comparison would distinguish intervention effects from case-mix and seasonal variation?","Would low-income, rare-species, or less influential cases experience improved, unchanged, or worsened access under the rule?","What startup and recurring labor would screening, coordination, monitoring, and governance require locally?","Is the proposed release mechanism already used in veterinary or analogous perioperative settings, and if so, what incremental claim remains testable?."],"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["Closed-book assessment with no external evidence about veterinary scheduling prevalence, demand, prior art, realized impact, market size, or exact cost.","The candidate is a hypothesis and contains no local timestamped audit results or comparative intervention outcomes.","Cost bands are resource-equivalent planning ranges based only on the stated scope; local software, labor, compliance, and partner-coordination requirements are unknown.","Rare safety events may not be estimable in a short pilot, so absence of observed harm would not establish safety.","Pilot findings from selected elective blocks may not generalize to emergency, specialty, high-complexity, or differently staffed services."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior art is unsearched and world novelty is unmeasured. This assessment makes no claim that conditional release, cross-service OR queues, or the specified veterinary implementation is new, uncommon, or superior to existing practice."}