If the routes are well planned, there is more time for care. A study carried out by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM together with the billing service provider ARZ Haan shows just how much potential there is for improvement in route planning.
The results of the two-year project »Conception of Data-Driven Business Models in the Healthcare Sector«, KoGGe for short, are impressive: After optimization, the tours are on average twenty percent shorter, the time spent by using highly qualified care staff for comparatively simple tasks has been reduced by more than ten percent and the desired time periods in which those in need of care want to be cared for have almost all been met – all significant improvements!
Care tour planners know what is important during a home visit and how long it takes. Do the people visited need help with eating? Do they need help with personal hygiene? These and similar needs are taken into account when planning outpatient care tours.
The KoGGe project began with manually designed plans that put nursing staff under a lot of time pressure, for example because there were often long distances between individual patients. In addition, some staff were not always deployed according to their qualifications. Both of these factors generate costs and have a negative impact on staff motivation and satisfaction, which is particularly serious in a service sector that is already suffering from a permanent shortage of skilled staff and therefore too few personnel.
»We see our task as optimization and decision support for route planning,« says Dr. Alexander Scherrer. He is responsible for KoGGe in his role as deputy head of »Optimization in the Life Sciences«, part of the division »Optimization« at Fraunhofer ITWM. »Using our methods, the software quickly calculates optimal plans for outpatient care tours. And with decision support, route planners then transparently compare plan options with each other in order to select the most suitable route in a targeted manner.«
The project partner is DM EDV GmbH, a subsidiary of the ARZ Haan Group. The company has been developing and selling intelligent software solutions for the care sector for 30 years. »Thanks to automated post-optimization, outpatient care facilities save costs on the one hand and increase the satisfaction of their customers and employees on the other,« says Stephan Pleye, Managing Director of DM EDV GmbH. »In a society in which more and more people are dependent on care services, such optimization approaches are playing an increasingly important role.«
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM