TITLE: Methods for dynamic scheduling of home health practitioners

SPEAKER: Ashlea Bennett

ABSTRACT:

Effective utilization of nurses is crucial in meeting the demand for home care, which is expected to double by 2030, just as the nursing supply shortage increases to 400,000. We attempt to improve nurse utilization by developing automated solution procedures for the dynamic scheduling of home health nurses.

The routing and scheduling problems encountered in the home health industry are dynamic and periodic variants of routing problems that typically include fixed appointment times. Because this is a component not often addressed in the routing literature, we investigate the impact of fixed appointment times on resulting schedules. A solution approach for the dynamic periodic problem variant is developed that uses insertion criteria specific to the fixed appointment time setting. The approach is compared to a more traditional routing heuristic on a set of test problems that have a variety of patient location distributions and arrival frequencies. Computational results are presented.