Abstract
The importance of home healthcare is growing rapidly since populations of developed and even developing countries are getting older and the number of hospitals, retirement homes, and medical staff do not increase at the same rate. We consider the Home Healthcare Nurse Scheduling Problem where patients arrive dynamically over time and acceptance and appointment time decisions have to be made as soon as patients arrive. The objective is to maximise the average number of daily visits for a single nurse. For the sake of service continuity, patients have to be visited at the same day and time each week during their episode of care. We propose a new heuristic based on generating several scenarios which include randomly generated and actual requests in the schedule, scheduling new customers with a simple but fast heuristic, and analysing results to decide whether to accept the new patient and at which appointment day/time. We compare our approach with two greedy heuristics from the literature, and empirically demonstrate that it achieves significantly better results compared to these other two methods.
Highlights
Home Healthcare (HHC), referred to as in-home care, social care, or domiciliary care, is becoming one of the most important components of healthcare
It is clear that assessing a whole week with all visits of different requests in each scenario of Weekly Scenario Based Approach (WSBA) significantly increases computations compared to decomposing a week into separate days and evaluating them independently in Daily Scenario Based Approach (DSBA)
The problem is dynamic and assignment time decisions have to be made as soon as patients arrive by considering service continuity
Summary
Home Healthcare (HHC), referred to as in-home care, social care, or domiciliary care, is becoming one of the most important components of healthcare. The HHC provider has to decide whether or not to accept the patient and, if accepted, assign suitable appointment days and times. There are some studies providing solutions to this problem by using greedy algorithms in the literature, these algorithms do not consider or only partially consider future demand. We propose a Scenario Based Approach (SBA) which simulates several scenarios, scheduling new customers with a simple but fast heuristic, and analysing results to decide whether to accept the new patient and at which appointment day\time. – A new acceptance and scheduling policy based on a solution methodology which anticipates future demand for the Dynamic HHC problem,.
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