ORAHS2024
Abstract Submission

264. A bilevel approach to the Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem

Contributed abstract in session ME-4: Home Care /1, stream Regular talks.

Monday, 15:30-16:40
Room: Room S3

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Maria Teresa Godinho
Mathematics, ESTIG-IPBEJA &CmafCIO
2. Maria João Lopes
Departamento de Métodos Quantitativos para a Gestão e Economia, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE - IUL) and CMAFcIO

Abstract

In a number of societies we are witnessing a steady increase in the incidence of chronic diseases, resulting in a growth of the number of people requiring continuous, specialized health care support. However, long, repeated hospital stays are undesirable, both due to clinical and social-economic reasons. Loss of mobility, immune suppression, depression and cognitive decline are often found in patients with prolonged hospitalizations.
One way of mitigating these problems is through home health care services. Many medical treatments can be carried out at patients’ homes, freeing hospital beds and contributing to increasing the patients’ (and their families) quality of life.
The generic term "Home health care" covers several regulated programs of care delivered at the patient's home. In Portugal, social security and the national health system offer different levels of home care, including custodial care (CC), intermediate or integrated continuing care (ICC) and highly skilled hospital level care (HHC) Despite the significant clinical differences, the three types of care have similar logistical needs: in essence, organizing the caregivers teams and the visits to the patients. In this talk, we propose a bilevel single commodity flow model of the routing problem where the outer level problem focus on the total operation cost and the inner level deals with degree of the caregiver team’s satisfaction. Preliminary computational results will be provided at the talk.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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