The Centralization and Sharing of Information for Improving a Resilient Approach Based on Decision-Making at a Local Home Health Care Center

Featured Application In this article, we propose a resilient approach toward the centralization and sharing of information for improving the decision-making of caregivers in local healthcare centers in addition to reducing the number of late arrivals, the total time of late arrivals, and the number of routes ending after the work end time. Coupled with a connected IT tool, such as a smartphone application, this approach would improve the working lives of caregivers. Home care centers face both an increase in demand and many variations during the execution of routes, compromising the routes initially planned; robust solutions are not effective enough, and it is necessary to move on to resilient approaches. We create a close-to-reality use case supported by interviews of staff at home health care centers, where caregivers are faced with unexpected events that compromise their initial route. We model, analyze, and compare two resilient approaches to deal with these disruptions: a distributed collaborative approach and a centralized collaborative approach, where we propose a centralization and sharing of information to improve local decision-making. The latter reduces the number of late arrivals by 11%, the total time of late arrival by 21%, and halves the number of routes exceeding the end of work time (contrary to the distributed collaborative approach due to the time wasted reaching colleagues). The use of a device, such as a smartphone application, to centralize and share information thus, allows better mutual assistance between caregivers. Moreover, we highlight several possible openings, like the coupling of simulation and optimization, to propose a more resilient approach.