Select, Route and Schedule: Optimizing Community Paramedicine Service Delivery with Mandatory Visits and Patient Prioritization

Shima Azizi (saziziwpi.edu)
Brenton Faber (bdfaberwpi.edu)
Sharon Johnson (sharonwpi.edu)
Renata Konrad (rkonradwpi.edu)
Andrew C. Trapp (atrappwpi.edu)

Abstract: Many patients receive reactive care in the United States healthcare system, including those who frequent emergency rooms and who are recently discharged from a hospital. Community paramedicine is a recent healthcare innovation that enables proactive visitation of patients at home, often shortly after emergency department and hospital discharge. We propose an optimization framework for managing a community paramedicine program with the goals of lowering hospital costs, reducing readmissions and emergency department visits, as well as increasing patient welfare. We develop a prioritization method for patient visits based on patient health features, and this information is integrated into an optimization-based approach that selects patients, schedules patient visits and routes healthcare providers to maximize overall patient welfare, while favoring shorter tours. We carry out computational experiments on a variety of test instances based on real data from a hospital system in upstate New York and discuss insights resulting from our computational findings.

Keywords: Community Paramedicine, Integer Optimization, Team Orienteering, Mandatory Visits, Time Windows.

Category 1: Applications -- OR and Management Sciences

Citation: Azizi, S., Faber, B., Johnson, S., Konrad, R., Trapp, A.C. 2020. Select, Route and Schedule: Optimizing Community Paramedicine Service Delivery with Mandatory Visits and Patient Prioritization. Technical Report. URL http://www.optimization-online.org/DB_HTML/2020/12/8151.html

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Entry Submitted: 12/10/2020
Entry Accepted: 12/10/2020
Entry Last Modified: 12/10/2020

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