Dessevre, G.; Martinez, C.; Zhang, L.; Bortolaso, C.; Fontanili, F. The Centralization and Sharing of Information for Improving a Resilient Approach Based on Decision-Making at a Local Home Health Care Center. Appl. Sci.2023, 13, 8576.
Dessevre, G.; Martinez, C.; Zhang, L.; Bortolaso, C.; Fontanili, F. The Centralization and Sharing of Information for Improving a Resilient Approach Based on Decision-Making at a Local Home Health Care Center. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 8576.
Dessevre, G.; Martinez, C.; Zhang, L.; Bortolaso, C.; Fontanili, F. The Centralization and Sharing of Information for Improving a Resilient Approach Based on Decision-Making at a Local Home Health Care Center. Appl. Sci.2023, 13, 8576.
Dessevre, G.; Martinez, C.; Zhang, L.; Bortolaso, C.; Fontanili, F. The Centralization and Sharing of Information for Improving a Resilient Approach Based on Decision-Making at a Local Home Health Care Center. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 8576.
Abstract
Home care centers face both an increase in demand and many variations during the execution of routes, compromising the routes initially planned: robust solutions are not effective enough, it is necessary to move on to resilient approaches. We create a close to reality use case supported by interviews of staff at home health care centers, where caregivers are faced with unexpected events that compromise their initial route. We model, analyze and compare three resilient approaches to deal with these disruptions: a baseline approach without any collaboration, a distributed collaborative approach, and a centralized collaborative approach, where we propose a centralization and sharing of information to improve local decision-making. The latter reduces the number of late arrivals by 11% and the total time of late arrival by 21%, and also halves the number of routes exceeding the end of work time (contrary to the distributed collaborative approach, due to the time wasted reaching colleagues). The use of a device, such as a smartphone application, to centralize and share information thus allows better mutual assistance between caregivers. Moreover, we highlight several possible openings like the coupling of simulation and optimization to propose a more resilient approach.
Keywords
home health care routing & scheduling problem; resilience; discrete event simulation; optimization
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Health Policy and Services
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.