A Decision Tool for Negotiating Home Care Funding Levels in Ontario

Abstract

This paper describes a decision tool created for the Simcoe County Community Care Access Center (SCCCAC) in Ontario. The tool allows the SCCCAC to quantitatively assess the trade-offs between cost, quality, and waiting time of their home care patients. This information can then be used to negotiate reasonable funding levels with the Ontario government and to appropriately allocate this funding among the various patient groups at the SCCCAC. This work can be expanded to other health care organizations that use prioritized waiting lists.

Modelling home care organisations from an operations management perspective

“…Boldy and Howell (1980) presented a case study that describes the implementation of methods for geographically partitioning a set of HC human resources among several social services. Busby and Carter (2006) examined the funding issue with a data-driven decision tool that allows the administrator of a public HC organisation in Ontario to assess quantitatively the trade-offs between cost, quality (defined by the number of patient visits) and waiting time of their HC patients. Their analysis was later used to negotiate reasonable funding levels with the government.…”

Exploring new operational research opportunities within the Home Care context: the chemotherapy at home

“…Dealing with a funding problem, Busby and Carter [5] describe a decision tool created for the Simcoe County Community Care Access Center (SCCCAC) (i.e. administrator of public home care for Simcoe County) in Ontario.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…Home care organizations dimension their resources, to spend the available budget such that a satisfactory quality of care is realized and access times are minimized [37,75]. To this end, provider capacity must be matched with patient demand.…”

“…Many healthcare professionals are involved in home care delivery, including nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech therapists, nutritionists, home support workers, social workers, physicians and pharmacists [75,305]. For each skill category it is determined whether to employ staff or to (temporarily) hire staff from an external agency when required [37].…”

“…Basic rules from queueing theory demonstrate the necessity of excess capacity to cope with uncertain demand [75]. Variation arises not only from uncertainty in the arrival process of care requests but also from the different levels of care required per patient [37].…”