An Integrated Spatial DSS for Scheduling and Routing Home-Health-Care Nurses

Currently over 10,000 organizations in the United States provide nursing-related services in patients' homes. These organizations face an interesting manpower-deployment decision problem—scheduling which available nurse to see which patient, when, and what travel routes to use. Such issues as adhering to physician-specified requirements on the number of weekly visits make the underlying optimization problem challenging. In a joint project, the University of Alabama's Productivity Center and the Visiting Nurses Association developed a spatial decision support system (SDSS) to address this problem. It successfully integrates stand-alone PC-based geographic-information-system software with scheduling heuristics and databases to form a user-friendly tool that saves the association travel time and schedule-preparation time (over $20,000 a year) and improves the balance of work among nurses.