Continuity of care in home health care scheduling: a rolling horizon approach

This work addresses a home health care scheduling problem faced by home care agencies. In home health care scheduling, there is a desire to retain consistency with respect to the home health aide servicing each patient; this consistency is referred to as continuity of care. To address this preference for continuity of care, we propose a rolling horizon approach to the scheduling problem and introduce the consistent home health care scheduling problem (Con-HHCSP). The goal is to be able to quantify and control the deviation of the new schedule suggested each day from the existing schedule in place, so that some of the existing assignments may be retained in the new schedule that is produced. We present two different methods to solve Con-HHCSP on a daily basis: an integer programming-based method with approximations and a variant of a petal heuristic. We discuss the performance and computational efficiency of these methods.