Home healthcare and home care are expected to see increased demand, as more elderly patients and those with underlying health conditions stay home to lessen their risk of exposure to COVID-19\. Cutting down on contact with others remains the most assured safeguard for minimising risk of exposure to COVID-19 and the consequences of infection. Our solution aims to improve existing technology as well as adding novel features allowing for more safety (safe bubbles) and flexibility (real-time allocation).
Home health care scheduling and routing problems are notoriously hard to solve. They involve the assignment of caregivers to residencies to perform tasks that require specific skills within a predefined time frame. They are multi-period in nature, very large-scale, and they exhibit some very unique features, such as regional assignment restrictions, compliance with skill levels and other service qualifications, hard or soft synchronisation and priority constraints, multiple start and end locations (e.g., start from medical centre and return home at the end of the shift), different rules and targets for in-house and contracting employees, multiple transportation modes, multiple service time windows, deadlines, complex cost functions for outsourcing, reimbursement or overtime, hours of service regulations (e.g., max duty times and break requirements) multiple shifts per day, and other operational realities.
Taking into account the challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, our solution will reduce infection risks associated with multiple care contacts, improve efficiency of staff, and optimise routes to minimize travel time and distance (thus lowering the environmental burden). This is in line with advice by the UK Government and NHS England on home health care which promotes segmenting patients into cohorts based on their risk of exposure to the virus. In addition it recommends segmenting staff into groups each dealing with a specific patient cohort and accounting for staff risks relating to the virus.
Lastly, the proposed solution considers that there may be unexpected changes that disrupt the established service plan. Using our state-of-the-art staff scheduling technologies our solution is able to readjust the schedules in real-time.
In summary, the tool will deliver the following benefits:
1. Safe Bubbles - Reduced infection risk by restricting exposure due to contained staff and patient groups. allocate care workers in such a way that minimizes the size of potential infection chains, by forming contained "care bubbles".
2. Increased flexibility and adaptability- Our solution allows for effective real-time scheduling to a) minimize the total required time of (often manual) rescheduling, and b) relieve inefficiency caused by unexpected events leading to delayed or low-quality service.
3. Elevated capacity in the system -- State-of-the art optimisation to improve scheduling efficiencies within home care teams, increasing satisfaction and capacity for more patients to be supported.
4. Smarter staff distribution -- Explicitly matching staff skills and preferences to patient need, ensuring staff focus contact time where their skills are needed most (including remote contacts where appropriate).
5. Environmental benefits - Lowering emissions from both unnecessary (where remote consultation can suffice) and inefficient car journeys, and reducing the need for patients to go to health services.