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Activity Funded

Optimizing Home Health Care 1.0

Otimização de Cuidados de Saúde ao Domicílio 1.0

Reference
2024.17418.PEX
Project Start Date
2026-02-23
Project End Date
2027-08-22
Principal Investigator
Scientific Area
Exact sciences
Funding Program
Concurso para Projetos de Investigação de caráter Exploratório em Todos os Domínios Científicos 2024

Abstract

The OPTHCare1.0 project - Optimizing Home Health Care 1.0 - aims to study, within the scope of optimization and operational research, a set of problems that arise in the context of home healthcare and which involve various challenges. As the population ages and the prevalence of chronic diseases increases, the demand for alternatives to hospitalization is growing, with home care standing out as a viable option. This increasingly diverse and complex care includes visits to monitor, administer treatments and carry out medical interventions, avoiding the traditional hospitalization, which improves patients' quality of life and reduces costs for health systems. Home healthcare services face complex combinatorial optimization challenges, such as assigning technicians, routing visits and managing limited resources. The provision of care involves issues such as patient well-being, the specificity of the services and logistical constraints. The project proposes to tackle problems such as the scheduling of visits by technicians from different specialties, considering aspects such as schedules, precedence, routes, synchronization and management of shared resources. The aim is to identify and model these challenges, proposing mathematical models that integrate various decisions to be made, as well as exact and heuristic resolution methods. The project also addresses the development of valid inequalities and exact and heuristic separation algorithms. To solve mixed integer linear programming problems, techniques such as branch-and-bound, branch-and-cut and branch-and-price will be explored. Overall, the aim is to increase the number of services that can be carried out at home, to improve the entire healthcare system and, above all, the well-being of patients.

Institutions

Main Institutions

  • Universidade de Lisboa Centro de Matematica Aplicada à Previsão e Decisão Económica (ULisboa CEMAPRE)

Funding 59.989,10 €

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Portugal

59.989,10 €