Integrating tactical and operational decision-making in home health care services (R-11521)

Home health care (HHC) is an important component of the health care industry and may be defined as care workers visiting patients following predefined schedules in order to provide medical services in their home. Maintaining a sustainable, easily accessible and effective health care system is a major challenge nowadays as a result of two trends: limited resources and a rise in demand. In response to these trends and the increasing competitive pressures, HHC providers must discover new ways to decrease costs and enhance productivity by optimizing the use of resources. For this reason, applying operations research (OR) techniques in HHC is a promising research field. The goal of this project is to develop OR-models that enable making better dimensioning decisions (determining the optimal number of staff with different skills within all regions) by taking the implications on rostering, scheduling and routing into account. In a first phase of the project, the rostering, scheduling and routing part of the problem will be tackled in detail. In the second phase, research will focus on the integration of previously mentioned aspects with dimensioning.

Keywords:Home healthcare, Nurse rostering, Resource dimensioning, Vehicle routing

Disciplines:Operations research and mathematical programming, Business economics, Logistics and supply chain management, Mathematical methods, programming models, mathematical and simulation modelling