AN INTEGRATED SPATIAL DSS FOR SCHEDULING AND ROUTING HOME-HEALTH-CARENURSES

Currently over 10,000 organizations in the United States provide nursi ng-related services in patients' homes. These organizations face an in teresting manpower-deployment decision problem-scheduling which availa ble nurse to see which patient, when, and what travel routes to use. S uch issues as adhering to physician-specified requirements on the numb er of weekly visits make the underlying optimization problem challengi ng. In a joint project, the University of Alabama's Productivity Cente r and the Visiting Nurses Association developed a spatial decision sup port system (SDSS) to address this problem. It successfully integrates stand-alone PC-based geographic-information-system software with sche duling heuristics and databases to form a user-friendly tool that save s the association travel time and schedule-preparation time (over $20, 000 a year) and improves the balance of work among nurses.