Abstract
Health Centers have among one of their many tasks the provision of health care at home. This service is provided by teams of health professionals, usually composed of physicians and nurses belonging to the Health Centers. The scheduling of the visits is made by a health professional that groups one or more routes in order to minimize the time of team’s visits. However, as there is no technical or computer application to plan and optimize the visits in a systematic way, the obtained solutions are rarely the best ones. To improve this situation we were challenged by a Health Center to create an application to optimize the visits of health care professionals. This paper presents the solution developed involving a web application called “Health at Home”, which uses the heuristic of Clarke and Wright. The main novelty of this work is the inclusion of priority and non-priority patients, according to their degree of aseptic, within the routes optimization of the health professionals’ teams.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all help given by our Information Technology Management course colleagues that have contributed for the development of this project, in particular to Daniel Fernandes that contributed with advises to some design issues of the web application. We would also like to thank nurse Mariana Costa, a nurse practitioner, for the idea that originated this entire project, as well for her support. Lastly we would like to thank the reviewers for the corrections and the suggestions that helped improve this paper.
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Bastos, B., Heleno, T., Trigo, A., Martins, P. (2015). Web Based Application for Home Care Visits’ Optimization of Health Professionals’ Teams of Health Centers. In: Almeida, J., Oliveira, J., Pinto, A. (eds) Operational Research. CIM Series in Mathematical Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20328-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20328-7_3
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