A multi-user tool for enhancing the daily replanning and control of visits in home care services

Abstract

The uncertainty associated with patients’ demands and operators’ availabilities is the main complexity factor in planning health care activities. Thus, activity replanning is required to react to the variations and to guarantee a good service quality. A particularly complex replanning activity is required in Home Care (HC) services, where any variation to the plans involves several decisions related, e.g. to nurses’ travels. Such complexity makes impossible for planners to integrate and to effectively handle all of the information in real time with the classical HC management tools. In this work, we design, implement and validate a new visualisation tool to support HC planners in handling the data, to better perform their replanning activities. The tool consists of a desk equipped with an interactive map, where up to four planners can manage the information together in a multilayer configuration. This solution allows to manage the high amount of data in a more effective and natural way than the tabular form of the current commercial tools, due to both the horizontal map visualisation and the multilayer information provisioning. The prototype has been tested with real HC planners and expert users; outcomes show the capability to meet the gap between planners and information complexity, and to provide adequate support for replanning HC activities.

Keywords:

• Home care
• daily replanning and control
• human intervention
• collaborative work
• supporting tool

Acknowledgements

Authors thank Aurelie Larcher, Thibault Louis and Patrick Maigrot for their contributions to the development of the software, and Cecily Castelnovo for the contribution to the validation with real HC planners.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the VISIONAIR Project (www.infra-visionair.eu) through the Trans National Projects [number 29], [number 138].