A Home Care Scheduling Model For Human Resources

Home care service is recognized to be one of the major solutions to contain costs in health care. However delivering this service is not an easy task because of the large number of actors that participate in the process, of the variety of clinical and organizational decisions, and last but not less important, of the difficulty of synchronizing human and material resources at patient's home. In this paper we propose a linear integer scheduling model developed to support human resource short term planning in home care. In particular, the model deals with the problem of deciding (a) which human resource should be used and (b) when to execute the service during the planning horizon, in order to satisfy the care plan for each patient served by the home care providers. The scheduling model has been tested on different real data sets collected from two Italian home care providers. The weekly plans generated by the proposed model have been compared with the real ones. The main result is a significant benefit, in terms of the increase in service quality and in efficiency, obtained by using operations research techniques in the home care short term planning