Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem with Service Prioritization
Home Health Care, Service Prioritization, Linear Programming, Revenue Maximization, Cost Minimization
The home care service is a type of health care that comprises a set of prevention, rehabilitation, and treatment actions for illnesses provided at home. With the emergence of COVID-19, home care became even more present, replacing or complementing hospital admission, offering a more humanized type of care for people with a stable clinical condition who require medical care. Scheduling and routing health professionals who provide such services has some challenges, including serving patients within the health professional's working hours, having an appropriately sized team of professionals, ensuring patient and professional satisfaction, saving costs on the fleet of vehicles that transport professionals, etc. This work presents a new variant of the problem, dividing patients into priority and optional. Priority patients must be treated within the defined planning horizon. It is desirable that, as far as possible, optional customers are also served. The objective is to maximize the revenue received from services minus the transport costs of professionals. This work presents an Integer Linear Programming model for the problem. The model is implemented and tested on a set of instances also proposed in this work. In the variant discussed here, each professional is transported by a vehicle. This work also presents a comprehensive review of the literature on the Health Professional Routing and Scheduling Problem, in which several mathematical models found in the literature were implemented and compared to evaluate their efficiency and applicability in the context of the problem studied.