Real-time scheduling optimization considering the unexpected events in home health care

Home health care, a new kind of health services that can be given in home for special populations (elderly, disabled, youth, etc.), is usually less expensive, more convenient and more efficient. Based on the face-to-face (in-person) interviews, we find that scheduling arrangements of home health care are often affected by some unexpected events such as cancellation of services, demand for emergency care and medical device failures. These events may lead to medical scheduling conflicts and therefore might decrease patient satisfaction due to the delayed service. Considering the emergencies in the home health care, this study takes the home health care mode under the unexpected events as the research object and focuses on the time window constraints involved in the real-time scheduling problem. In order to obtain an optimal medical dispatch program and ensure patients' golden period for treatment, we establish an effective real-time scheduling model to minimize the total required time of scheduling, and propose an improved memetic algorithm to optimize the model. Empirical analysis was then adopted to verify the rationality of the model. Finally, we analyze the practical effect of dispatching decision and put forward the recommendations for future research directions.