Problema de roteamento e escalonamento de profissionais de saúde no atendimento domiciliar com priorização no atendimento

Abstract

The home care service is a type of health care that comprises a set of prevention, rehabilitation, and treatment actions for illnesses provided at home. With the emergence of COVID-19, home care became even more present, replacing or complementing hospital admission, offering a more humanized type of care for people with a stable clinical condition who require medical care. Scheduling and routing health professionals who provide such services have some challenges, including serving patients during the health professional’s working hours, having an appropriately sized team of professionals, ensuring patient and professional satisfaction, and saving costs on the fleet of vehicles that transport professionals, among others. This work presents a new variant of the problem where patients are divided into two groups regarding care: priority and optional. Priority patients must be treated within the defined planning horizon. Nonmandatory customers should also be served. The objective is to maximize the revenue received from services minus the transport costs. This work presents an Integer Linear Programming model for the problem. The model is implemented and tested on a set of instances also proposed in this work. In the variant discussed here, each professional is transported by a vehicle. This work also presents a comprehensive review of the literature on the Healthcare Professional Routing and Scheduling Problem, including an experimental analysis of mathematical models to minimize the distance traveled by healthcare professionals. The analysis aims to evaluate the efficiency and applicability of such models in the context of the problem studied.