HealthFaCT – Optimizing Outpatient Medical Care in Rural Areas

Research Alliance with Focus on Three Pillars

The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and focuses on three major pillars of outpatient care: Pharmacies, emergency doctors, and ambulance and rescue services.

Together with our project partners RWTH Aachen University, Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, we are optimizing the following three areas based on future requirements forecasting:

• Location structure and emergency service plan for pharmacies
• Location structure and resource distribution for emergency doctors
• Waiting times in the ambulance and rescue services

Software-Based Implementation of Mathematical Algorithms

The project primarily studies location, coverage, and route planning problems from a mathematical perspective. The main challenges are real time optimization and robustness against uncertainties. Moreover, in a complex use case with divergent target functions, it is not possible to determine a single optimal solution by means of a purely algorithmic approach.

Therefore, we develop a data-driven tool that focuses on the decision maker. The software objectively shows the user different options and provides opportunities to interactively evaluate the solutions. Discussions with the application partners prove the need and the enormous potential of such a software-based optimization and decision-making system.

Background of the Project HealthFaCT

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsors the joint project »HealthFaCT: Optimizing Outpatient Medical Care in Rural Areas« until November 2019 with up to 1.1 million Euros. The software is still in development, but at the end of the running time the researches want to offer a planning tool, that ideally optimizes the medical care in all the rural areas of Germany.