An integrated model for home health care and patients cluster based care

In this paper, we study the integration of Home Health Care (HHC) resource dimensioning and assignment problem with the patients group based health care activities. A mathematical model is developed considering the recruitment of health care staff, selection of HHC offices, identification of patients cluster centers and corresponding assignment issues among these entities. The proposed mathematical model not only determines the optimal number of health care workers, HHC offices and patient cluster centres based on their location but also performs the assignment tasks. The model is solved with the CPLEX and behaviour of the model is explored with respect to different scenarios. The results indicate that the model successfully tackles the considered issues, whereas, scenarios based solutions provide an in depth insight about the operational improvement considering specific criteria in the objective function.