| Article ID: | iaor19981258 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 27 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Start Page Number: | 35 |
| End Page Number: | 48 |
| Publication Date: | Jul 1997 |
| Journal: | Interfaces |
| Authors: | Miller David M., Begur Sachidanand V., Weaver Jerry R. |
| Keywords: | scheduling, health services, artificial intelligence: decision support |
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 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.