Healthcare at home facility location-allocation problem

This article presents the healthcare at home (HAH) facility location-allocation problem, introducing new decisions: (i) location of facilities in a region, (ii) assignment of demand to HAH companies, (iii) authorization for delivering some specific care and (iv) allocation of resources. HAH became popular in developed country because they offer flexible services to patients at home while decreasing the number of hospitalized patients. This study is motivated by the two statements: (i) increasing demand for healthcare services such as palliative care due to an ageing population, and (ii) increasing costs in traditional hospitalization due to new economic regulation (fee for service basis, “Tarification à l´activité”). The proposed problem is NP-Hard (multi-period, multi-resource, multi-facility location-allocation problem). Instances derived from real case study (HAH network of Rhone-Alps region) of the problem are solved using the branch and bound procedure of IBM ILOG CPLEX.