Decision Support System For Home Health Care Management: The Brazilian Cases

Home health care services represent an alternative to conventional healthcare, especially in developed nations with aging populations. The effective delivery of these services involves overcoming multiple logistical challenges. Thus, this study seeks to develop a decision support system to optimize districting and route planning in the HHC context, applied to a set of cases in Brazil. The decision support system consists of a multiobjective model for districting and a route simulation module that allows for estimating the logistics costs of this districting. The model combines four different dimensions: service efficiency, workload balancing for teams, contiguity and compactness of districts. The obtained results revealed that the decision support system was able to solve the districting and route planning problems in several cases. The districting plans obtained through the multiobjective model can yield improvements in one or both objectives when compared to the current plans.