Scheduling healthcare services in a home healthcare system

Abstract

We consider a scheduling problem in a home healthcare system in which nurses visit patients regularly for relatively minor healthcare services. Intervals between the visits may differ for different patients. On each day in the planning horizon, a nurse must visit the patients assigned to her/him on that day, and then return to the hospital. For the problem of determining the visiting schedule with the objective of minimizing total travel time of the nurse over the planning horizon, we develop a two-phase heuristic algorithm. To evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm, a series of computational tests is performed on a number of randomly generated problem instances and a real instance. Results of the tests show that the heuristic algorithm gives near optimal solutions for problems of practical sizes in a reasonable time.

Solving a More Flexible Home Health Care Scheduling and Routing Problem with Joint Patient and Nursing Staff Selection

“…A HHC problem based on patient care intervals over a planning horizon was proposed by An et al [17]. The objective function minimizes the total travel time of nurses over the planning period.…”

Disruption Management for the Real-Time Home Caregiver Scheduling and Routing Problem

“…Nickel et al [15] use different meta-heuristics (e.g., the adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic and the TS heuristic) integrated with methods from constraint programming to address the weekly HCSRP that takes the minimization of the number of different nurses performing the service of each customer as a part of the objective function. An et al [16] investigate the HCSRP when the intervals between visits may vary for different patients and develop a two-phase heuristic to solve the problem. Bard et al [17][18][19] and Shao et al [20] design a sequential greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), a parallel GRASP, and a branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm to solve the weekly therapist routing and scheduling problem, which defines a set of therapists that can see a given patient.…”

A novel simulated metamorphosis algorithm for homecare nurse scheduling

“…The homecare nurse scheduling problem (HNSP) can be described as follows [13][14][15][16][17]. Consider a home healthcare center with m nurses to visit n patients.…”