Decision-making in home health care: state-of-the art and integrated model

Abstract

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 and effective health care system is a major challenge as a result of two trends: limited resources (budget restrictions and staff shortage) and a rise in demand. In response to these trends and 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 techniques in HHC is a promising research field. In this context, a key opportunity for improvement is the integration of decisions at different decision-making levels. More specifically, the goal of this research is to develop innovative models and solution algorithms that enable making better decisions on staffing levels by integrating staff dimensioning, rostering, clustering, scheduling and routing decisions. First, this talk will discuss the main findings of a literature review on OR models that integrate decisions at multiple decision-making levels. Second, a first MIP model focussing on the integration of the aforementioned decisions will be discussed.