An Integrated Spatial DSS for Scheduling and Routing Home-Health-Care Nurses

Sachidanand V. Begur, David M. Miller and Jerry R. Weaver
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Sachidanand V. Begur: OR Analysis, LCG Consulting, 4962 El Camino Real, Suite 112, Los Altos, California 94022
David M. Miller: Department of Management Science and Statistics, University of Alabama and Alabama Productivity Center, PO Box 870318 Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0318
Jerry R. Weaver: Department of Management Science and Statistics, PO Box 870226, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0226

Interfaces, 1997, vol. 27, issue 4, 35-48

Abstract: Currently over 10,000 organizations in the United States provide nursing-related services in patients' homes. These organizations face an interesting manpower-deployment decision problem—scheduling which available nurse to see which patient, when, and what travel routes to use. Such issues as adhering to physician-specified requirements on the number of weekly visits make the underlying optimization problem challenging. In a joint project, the University of Alabama's Productivity Center and the Visiting Nurses Association developed a spatial decision support system (SDSS) to address this problem. It successfully integrates stand-alone PC-based geographic-information-system software with scheduling heuristics and databases to form a user-friendly tool that saves the association travel time and schedule-preparation time (over $20,000 a year) and improves the balance of work among nurses.

Keywords: transportation; scheduling personnel; health care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
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