A New Method for Routing in Home Health Care Services

Abstract

Home Health Care Service (HHC) is a continuously growing new model in the healthcare sector. In HHC, patients are treated in their homes rather than at a healthcare provider. Treatment of patients in their own homes reduces health expenditures and increases the patient satisfaction at the same time. In HHC, the patients to be visited during the work day are determined in advance, necessary visits are made to the patient addresses, and treatment and care are provided to the patients at home. In this study, it was demonstrated that HHC problem can be solved by modelling it in a manner similar to Capacity Restricted Vehicle Routing Problem (C-VRP). In the new model obtained, the vehicles included in C-VRP, healthcare teams, the number of vehicles on hand, the number of healthcare teams active, customer addresses, patient addresses, vehicle capacity, daily working time of healthcare workers, the amount of load to be delivered to the customer, time to be spent for patient care or treatment at patient addresses were all included. Then, the obtained model was tried to be solved by using a heuristic approach. Experimental studies have shown that it is possible to prepare routes for patient visits in a way that does not exceed the daily working time of health workers.