Community Healthcare Scheduling

Customer Profile Spectrum Healthcare is a home healthcare agency which assigns care givers to homes or other locations designated by its customers to provide healthcare services. Spectrum maintains contractual relationship with a large base of independent care givers including nurses, personal support workers (PSW) and other healthcare practitioners. Spectrum assigns a home visit schedule (usually consists of multiple visits) to a care giver on a daily bases. Background Information Health care services at community level are largely standard procedures, such as blood draw or other basic service routines. At this level, clients’ overall experiences when receiving services play an important role in their assessment of the perceived quality of the services. Advances in Internet and mobile technologies enable traditional businesses to enhance their customer experience tremendously by providing business process automation, complete supply chain visibility and fast responses to changes. As the adoption of IT technologies has greatly improved service quality in large hospitals, health care networks at community level can also benefit from the broad connectivity and automated processing ability provided by Internet and mobile technologies. As a first step toward revolutionizing community level health care services and providing their customers with unprecedented service experiences, Spectrum Healthcare is in the process of automating its business processes using Internet and IT technologies. Product Description The product requested is a system which automates the care giver scheduling processes. With such a process, spectrum can optimize the utilization of care giver resources and improve care giver satisfaction by scheduling care givers based on their work schedule preferences and availability constraints. o A service request from a customer should contain the following information  Time preference: a customer could specify several time slots in which they are home and service can be provided. However, they may prefer some of them than others. Their preference over time slots is indicated by a preference score (from 1 to 10) for each time slot.  Type of request, including the type of service requested  Service location o A care giver should be characterized by their availability through the week and skill sets. o Request Scheduling: the task of the agency is to allocate submitted requests for a particular time window to care givers. The objective is to cover all submitted requests and, at the same time, maximize customer satisfaction. In the mean time, the allocation need to respect  Care giver’s availability  Eligibility of the care giver for a type of request: The type of the request allocated to a care giver should be covered by his/her skill set.  Feasibility of the schedule: The interval between any two adjacent requests should be greater than the travel time between the locations of the two requests.