241. A new variant of the home biomedical sample collection problem with drop-off points
Contributed abstract in session ME-4: Home Care /1, stream Regular talks.
Monday, 15:30-16:40Room: Room S3
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Yannick Kergosien
|
| Université de Tours | |
| 2. | Angel Ruiz
|
| Opérations et systèmes de décision, Université Laval |
Abstract
Medical services, like blood samples, play a vital role in healthcare. To improve the quality of services, some countries have reorganized their sample collection and laboratories’ networks by centralizing analysis activities in a limited number of strategic laboratories. Since samples are drawn at several collection centers, they need to be transported to laboratories via an inter-facility transport network that operates according to predetermined schedules. Meanwhile, a significant number of samples is also collected at home. In this case, caregivers visiting patients' homes must deliver the collected samples at their base. The study aims to investigate how these two independent transport networks can be coordinated so that home caregivers profit of local collection centers as drop-off points. Samples collected at patients’ homes will be joined to those taken at the collection centers and transported together to laboratories using the inter-facility transport network ensuring that the lifespan of samples is not exceeded. This problem extends the classic home care routing problems since it also requires planning stops at drop-off points so that samples can be delivered to the laboratory on time. This aspect adds significant complexity to the design of caregivers’ routes. We propose a iterative matheuristic to solve this challenging problem. Preliminary experiments have produced very encouraging results although the algorithm needs to be tested on real-sized instances.
Keywords
- Home care and Long Term Care
- Healthcare logistics
Status: accepted
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