Home health care planning with considering flexible starting/ending points and service features

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new mathematical model for home health care routing that accounts for flexible starting and ending points based on service features, improving route efficiency and adaptability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel model that incorporates service-specific route constraints, addressing a gap in existing home health care routing optimization methods.

Findings

The model effectively solves various problem sizes confirming its efficiency.

Sensitivity analysis provides managerial insights for service feature impacts.

Results demonstrate improved routing flexibility and cost reduction.

Abstract

One of the recently proposed strategies in health systems is providing services to patients at home, improving the service quality, besides reducing the health system costs. In the real world, some services, such as biological tests or blood sampling, force the nurses to start or end his/her route from/at the laboratory instead of the depot, changing the whole optimal planning. The effect of these special service requirements and features has not been considered so far. In this study, a new mathematical model is suggested considering the flexibility of starting/ending places of each nurse's route according to the specific characteristics of each service. Then several sets of problems in various sizes are solved using the proposed model, where the results confirm the efficiency of the proposed approach. In addition, some sensitivity analyses are performed on the parameters of the required features of the services, followed by some managerial insights and directions for future studies.