Operator assignment and routing problems in home health care services

Human resource planning in Home Health Care (HHC) services is a critical activity on which the quality of the delivered care depends. From the admission of the patient, the service organization has to decide the home operators who will follow the patients during their stay as well as the detailed care delivery plan. The robust resource planning is crucial for operations in the HHC structure, to avoid process inefficiencies, treatment delays and low quality of service. Many of HHC providers pursue the objective of continuity of care which is maintaining the same (principal) operator throughout the time the patient stays in the system. This paper proposes a two-stage approach for assignment and routing decisions in HHC organizations. The main goal is to analyze the interaction between the assignment and routing processes in a single district. All the proposed cases are applied on a instance generated from real data obtained by an Italian HHC provider.