A bi‐objective hospital at home routing and scheduling problem

Abstract

Hospital at home (HaH) is a hospital service where acute hospitalized patients are treated at their homes. These services reduce hospital length‐of‐stay, improve patient safety, and accelerate the recovery process, while reducing hospital costs and increasing the availability of beds. In this article, we introduce the HaH concept in the operations research & management science literature by addressing a hospital at home routing and scheduling problem of a Portuguese public hospital, where teams of physicians and nurses must visit different sets of patients on a daily basis. We propose a bi‐objective mixed integer linear programming model to minimize travel time and maximize a continuity of care score. To find the Pareto front, we use an exact ‐constraint method. Computational experiments are performed in real instances from hospital records and in instances adapted from benchmark instances for home health care problems. Results show the suitability of the proposed method for planning the case study HaH unit, and solutions are consistently better than the ones adopted by the hospital, considering both objectives.