A dynamic family doctor rescheduling problem with integrated home health care and outpatient services

Under China’s family doctor contract service system, patients receive either home health care or outpatient service depending on their mobility and contract contents. Considering the transitions of doctors’ service modes and the occurrence of dynamic demand events in the service processes, such as new requests, service cancellations and changes in patient availability, this paper proposes a dynamic rescheduling problem for family doctors that integrates home health care and outpatient services. Through a rolling horizon framework, we decompose the problem into three categories of subproblems: initial scheduling optimization, route re-optimization for home health care services and optimization of overtime scheduling for outpatient services. At each update time point, every subproblem is established as a deterministic mixed-integer programming model. To solve this problem, a rolling horizon-based algorithm that combines hybrid genetic algorithm with tabu search is proposed. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can efficiently solve the problem within a short time. Furthermore, we illustrate the problem properties through a sample instance.