Operations Research Applications in Home Healthcare

Abstract

The home health care industry is an important component of health care systems that have the potential to lower the system-wide costs of delivering care, and free capacity in overcrowded acute care settings such as hospitals. Demand is doubling, but resources are scarce. A nursing shortage and near-zero profit margins hinder the ability of home care agencies to meet the increasing patient demand. The effective utilization of resources is vital to the continued availability of home care services. There is tremendous opportunity for the operations research community to address the challenges faced by home care agencies to improve their ability to meet as much patient demand as possible. This chapter describes tactical and operational planning problems arising in home health care, and discusses alternative configurations of home health supply chains. Formulations for home health nurse districting, home health nurse routing and scheduling, and home health supply chain problems are presented, and the relevant literature is reviewed. Recent developments in remote monitoring technologies that could change the home health care landscape are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.

Planning the Delivery of Home-Based Long-Term Care: A Mathematical Programming-Based Tool to Support Routes’ Planning

“…Home Health Care (HHC) delivery is an important component of health care systems, having the potential to reduce costs of health care provision and free capacity in overcrowded acute care settings such as hospitals (Milburn, 2012). Nevertheless, this potential is found not only for general acute care services, but also in the Long-Term Care (LTC) sector.…”

“…However, the HHC sector, and the LTC sector in particular, are facing a challenge that need to be tackled as quick as possible: demand is doubling but health care resources are scarce (Milburn, 2012;WHO, 2000).…”

“…In fact, although informal delivery of LTC by families traditionally represents a cornerstone of LTC delivery, the development and strengthening of formal Home-Based LTC (hereafter-called HBLTC) by health professionals currently represents a policy priority across European countries. This is not only due to the expected growing demand for LTC (WHO, 2000;Milburn, 2012), but also to the decreasing reliance on informal care provided by families, due to the increase in female employment and migration of the younger members to urban centers (Simões et al, 2017). Fikar and Hirsch (2017) also noted another reason that is likely to lead to a substantial increase in demand for HHC services, which is the preference by patients who need continued nursing care to stay at their own home.…”

The Mathematical Model for searching the Shortest Route for TB Patients with the help of Dijkstra’s Algorithm

“…To find the shortest route from Malir Cantt to Nazimabad Chest Hospital for TB patients (under the supervision of Dow University), Dijkstra's algorithm showed itself to be useful in this mathematical model. Dijkstra's algorithm has been used to calculate the shortest route / path between the source node and every other node in the network [9][10] [13]. Dijkstra's Algorithm has been applied in a general manner so that it allows determining the shortest route / path between any two nodes in the network [14] [15].…”

An iterated beam search algorithm for the green vehicle routing problem

“…Some service fleets also travel substantially more miles than delivery fleets. For example, home health care service providers in the U.S. travel 5 billion miles a year, which is double the number of miles traveled by United Parcel Service (UPS) drivers [15].…”