Nurse-patient relationship for multi-period home health care routing and scheduling problem
Issued Date
2022-05-01
Resource Type
eISSN
19326203
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85130940710
Pubmed ID
35622818
Journal Title
PLoS ONE
Volume
17
Issue
5 May
Rights Holder(s)
SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
PLoS ONE Vol.17 No.5 May (2022)
Suggested Citation
Krityakierne T., Limphattharachai O., Laesanklang W. Nurse-patient relationship for multi-period home health care routing and scheduling problem. PLoS ONE Vol.17 No.5 May (2022). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0268517 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/20.500.14594/86512
Title
Nurse-patient relationship for multi-period home health care routing and scheduling problem
Author(s)
Author's Affiliation
Other Contributor(s)
Abstract
This article proposes a novel dynamic objective function in a multi-period home health care (HHC) problem, known as the nurse-patient relationship (NPR). The nurse-patient relationship score indicating the trust a patient has for his or her care worker increases when the same people meet regularly and decreases when they are apart. Managing human resources in HHC is a combination of routing and scheduling problems. Due to computational complexity of the HHC problem, a 28-day home health care problem is decomposed into daily subproblems, and solved sequentially with the tabu search. The solutions are then combined to give a solution to the original problem. For problems with less complex constraints, the NPR model can also be solved using exact methods such as CPLEX. For larger scale instances, however, the numerical results show that the NPR model can only be solved in reasonable times using our proposed tabu search approach. The solutions obtained from the NPR models are compared against those from existing models in the literature such as preference and continuity of care. Essentially, the analysis revealed that the proposed NPR models encouraged the search algorithm to assign the same care worker to visit the same patient. In addition, it had a tendency to assign a care worker on consecutive days to each patient, which is one of the key factors in promoting trust between patients and care workers. This leads to the efficacy of monitoring patient’s disease progression and treatment.