Continuity in Home Care visit planning is key to ensure costumer satisfaction

Municipality Varde, Denmark uses the route planning API to ensure continuity in Home Care visit planning.

Problem

For citizens with several visits spread over the day and week continuity is of great importance, so that they do not meet 15 – 20 different helpers during a week.

At the same time it is important that planners set realistic goals for continuity; especially for citizens with many visits.

Helpers working either full time or part time will influence how continuity can be implemented.

Business Logic

Continuity can be operationalized by:

  • Assignment of citizens to a team of employees
  • Assignment of citizens to a single or a few prioritized employees
  • Prioritization of employees who have been with the individual citizen within the last few weeks, e.g. with the greatest emphasis on the last week

Consideration of continuity should be weighted in relation to other considerations. 

Technical solution

Continuity is technically solved with two functions:

  • General continuity: For a calculated plan, a penalty is used, which minimizes the amount of different employees visiting a citizen
  • Applies per plan
  • Affinity: A matrix is ​​read in, which specifies preferences for employee/user combinations
  • This matrix can be specified by the planner, set up automatically based on previous plans, or historic visitation data

The diagram above illustrates that by using the continuity cost penalty function the of citizens visited by more than 1 helper decreases from 8 till 2 during the shift.

In Denmark the API is integrated with Deloitte Plans, the SaaS planning UI used by municipalities in Denmark. If you are working with visit planning in your SaaS solution and looking to add route planning and optimization –

Please reach out for a 20 min. advisory call about Home Care visit planning with Rapidis – please contact Leif Dahl Petersen