Scheduling optimization of home health care service considering patients' priorities and timewindows

As a new service model, home health care can provide effective health care by adopting door-to-door service. The reasonable arrangements for nurses and their routes not only can reduce medical expenses, but also can enhance patient satisfaction. This research focuses on the home health care scheduling optimization problem with known demands and service capabilities. Aimed at minimizing the total cost, an integer programming model was built in this study, which took both the priorities of patients and constraints of time windows into consideration. The genetic algorithm with local search was used to solve the proposed model. Finally, a case study of Shanghai, China, was conducted for the empirical analysis. The comparison results verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and methodology, which can provide the decision support for medical administrators of home health care.