A Bi-Objective Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Model with Considering Nurse Downgrading Costs

Abstract

In recent years, the management of health systems is a main concern of governments and decision-makers. Home health care is one of the newest methods of providing services to patients in developed societies that can respond to the individual lifestyle of the modern age and the increase of life expectancy. The home health care routing and scheduling problem is a generalized version of the vehicle routing problem, which is extended to a complex problem by adding special features and constraints of health care problems. In this problem, there are multiple stakeholders, such as nurses, for which an increase in their satisfaction level is very important. In this study, a mathematical model is developed to expand traditional home health care routing and scheduling models to downgrading cost aspects by adding the objective of minimizing the difference between the actual and potential skills of the nurses. Downgrading can lead to nurse dissatisfaction. In addition, skillful nurses have higher salaries, and high-level services increase equipment costs and need more expensive training and nursing certificates. Therefore, downgrading can enforce huge hidden costs to the managers of a company. To solve the bi-objective model, an ε-constraint-based approach is suggested, and the model applicability and its ability to solve the problem in various sizes are discussed. A sensitivity analysis on the Epsilon parameter is conducted to analyze the effect of this parameter on the problem. Finally, some managerial insights are presented to help the managers in this field, and some directions for future studies are mentioned as well.

Scheduling and Routing of Dispatching Medical Staff to Homes Healthcare from Different Medical Centers with considering Fairness Policy

“…Fairness policy first come, first serve (FCFS) considers the most priority factor to obtain from figure to strategies optimized solution for best satisfaction results. In 2018, Khodabandeh [23] used a Lagrangian relaxation-based method to solve a standard HHC model with the goal of minimizing total cost as a version of the VRPTW. ey also took into account the travel balancing hypothesis.…”

Advances in Population-Based Healthcare Research: From Measures to Evidence

“…By considering a travel balancing hypothesis, the authors proposed a straight-forward model that could be exploited to minimize the downgrading costs, which characterize the difference between the potential and actual skills of the nurses. The study also provides useful insights that are helpful to inform managerial decisions to better allocate available resources [ 5 ].…”

Home Health Care Problem with Synchronization Visits and Considering Samples Transferring Time: A Case Study in Tehran, Iran

“…Fikar and Hirsch [ 57 ] considered a boundary for the differences between these two numbers. Khodabandeh et al [ 58 ] developed a model for routing and scheduling nurses by downgrading the cost aspects of the problem by minimizing the difference between the nurses’ potential skills and their actual service plans. Another aspect of the problem is taking into account nurses’ and patients’ preferences.…”