Planning Strategies for Home Care Services

Abstract

In this paper the savings potential of alternative planning strategies for home care services is examined by means of two case studies. The problems are solved by commercial routing software and the results are demonstrated on data collected from a sparsely populated area in East Finland. The obtained empirical results show significant improvement potential. The worker productivity can be increased by 25.9−68.9% compared to current practice and the instant time at patient can be increased up to 75.8% of the shift length. The results also suggest that more efficient plans are possible in case the planning is done based on half-day shifts. Compared to other elderly care models, the results show that optimized home care is over twenty times cheaper, even in case of frequent visits and distant patient locations.