A routing problem for medical test sample collection in home health care services

Health care organizations are increasingly turning towards home care solutions to provide services to the population under their jurisdiction. Among these services, medical test sample collection (in particular blood and urine) is a highly demanded service by medical doctors. Providing this type of service clearly requires efficient coordination and planning of appointments for patients and healthcare personnel. This management involves the solution of a type of vehicle routing problem that is very complex given the large number and particular nature of the constraints that need to be considered: personnel schedules, patients preferences, maximum transport delay for some blood samples, etc. In this paper, we propose an integer linear programming formulation and different metaheuristics to solve this special vehicle routing problem. Experimental results on randomized instances were performed in order to select the best method to be integrated into a decision support tool and test it in on real data. This study is the result of collaboration with the blood collection service of the Center for Health and Social Service of Laval in the province of Quebec (CSSS-Laval).

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