Planning patients home care is a feat

Every day, thousands of home care nurses take to the road to treat a multitude of patients and provide them with quality care. Socially, there is a strong reappraisal of the important role these professionals perform in the first line of health care.

Home care planning such as home nursing and family care is extremely complex. It is an interplay of information, processes, people and resources. There are several parameters to consider:

  • logistic parameters (such as distance and work schedule);
  • care-specific parameters (such as severity of care and duration of care);
  • patient-specific parameters (preference, availability, visits from other care providers).

Making this planning is a time-intensive, and sometimes still manual process, which results in high costs for home care organisations. Inadequate planning results in inefficiency, resulting in lost time and dissatisfied patients and staff.

Planning tools in home care

Within the logistics sector, planning tools based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already in use. These offer intelligent help for structuring data to mimic human decisions and make predictions to support the planner. AI thus provides the planner with actionable insights so that home care workers can make better decisions and work more efficiently or in a more focused manner.

Research into home care planning with artificial intelligence

More and more healthcare organisations have increased interest in optimising the planning process through AI. After all, it can give them both time savings and an increase in customer and employee satisfaction. Yet, healthcare organisations and ICT companies are not quite "ready for AI" yet.

In this project, together with a consortium of field partners, we want to take the necessary research and development steps to make this innovation work for them. Specifically, we want answers to these questions, among others:

  • Which parameters (data) are necessary in order to plan home care?
  • In what way can this data be accurately and leanly captured in a home care setting?
  • How do home care professionals want to get started with an AI-based planning tool (implementation requirements)?

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