The home health care routing and scheduling problem with interdependent services

This paper presents a model for the daily planning of health care services carried out at patients’ homes by staff members of a home care company. The planning takes into account individual service requirements of the patients, individual qualifications of the staff and possible interdependencies be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Health care management science 2014-03, Vol.17 (1), p.15-30
Main Authors: Mankowska, Dorota Slawa, Meisel, Frank, Bierwirth, Christian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Business and Management
Caregivers
Computer Simulation
Costs and Cost Analysis
Econometrics
Efficiency, Organizational
Employees
Families & family life
Health Administration
Health care management
Health Informatics
Heuristic
Home Care Agencies - organization & administration
Home Care Services - organization & administration
Home health care
Job Satisfaction
Linear programming
Management
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Patient Satisfaction
Patients
Personnel Staffing and Scheduling - organization & administration
Planning
Qualifications
Scheduling
Studies
Systems Analysis
Time Factors
Transportation
Traveling salesman problem
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Summary:This paper presents a model for the daily planning of health care services carried out at patients’ homes by staff members of a home care company. The planning takes into account individual service requirements of the patients, individual qualifications of the staff and possible interdependencies between different service operations. Interdependencies of services can include, for example, a temporal separation of two services as is required if drugs have to be administered a certain time before providing a meal. Other services like handling a disabled patient may require two staff members working together at a patient’s home. The time preferences of patients are included in terms of given time windows. In this paper, we propose a planning approach for the described problem, which can be used for optimizing economical and service oriented measures of performance. A mathematical model formulation is proposed together with a powerful heuristic based on a sophisticated solution representation.
ISSN:1386-9620
1572-9389
DOI:10.1007/s10729-013-9243-1