MERGING SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM PLANNING PROBLEMS IN HOME HEALTH CARE UNDER CONTINUITY OF CARE AND PATTERNS FOR VISITS

Abstract

Home Health Care (HHC) human resource management is a complex process. Moreover, as patients are assisted for a long time, their demandfor care evolves in terms of type and frequency of visits. Under continuity ofcare, this uncertain evolution must be considered even when scheduling thevisits in the short-term, as the corresponding operator-to-patient assignmentscould generate overtimes and unbalanced workloads in the long-term, whichmust be fixed by reassigning some patients and deteriorating the continuityof care. On the other hand, the operator-to-patient assignment problem undercontinuity of care over a long time period could generate solutions thatare infeasible when the scheduling constraints are considered. We analyze the trade-offs between the two problems, to analyze the conditions in which theycan be sequentially solved or an integration is required. In particular, we takean assignment and scheduling model for short-term planning, an operator-topatientassignment model over a long time horizon, and we merge them intoa new combined model. Results on a set of realistic instances show that thecombined model is necessary when the number of patterns is limited and thevariability of patients' demands is high, whereas simpler models deserve to beapplied in less critical situations