Fall 2009 - H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems ...

ON THE MOVE
Transportation Logistics at ISyE
Effective utilization of nurses is
crucial in meeting the demand
for home care, which is expected
to double by 2030 according the
National Health Policy Forum of
The George Washington University.
Focus on: Ashlea Bennett
Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Models
for Home Healthcare Nurses
Ashlea Bennett, PhD candidate in the Stewart
School, was awarded a prestigious National
Science Foundation Graduate Research
Fellowship in 2003 that provided support for
academic research of her choice within her doctoral studies
program. Bennett, along with her faculty advisor Alan Erera,
had an interest in synthesizing concepts from logistics with
applications in healthcare. Drawing from Erera’s existing
work in freight transportation and Bennett’s desire to make
systems and processes more efficient within healthcare,
they decided to pursue the topic of routing and scheduling
models for home health nurses.
According to Bennett, the home health nurse routing and
scheduling problem is complex. For each patient, it must be
determined which nurse will visit the patient, what days the
patient will be visited on consecutive weeks throughout his
or her prescribed episode of care, and what times the visits
on those days will occur. The result culminating from each
of these patient-scheduling decisions is a set of nurse routes,
where each nurse leaves home at the beginning of the day
driving his or her own vehicle. The nurse then visits a predetermined
sequence of patients at precise visit times, and
returns home at the end of the day, without working more
than the maximum allowable hours. Further complicating
the problem is that many patient requests for home health
services must be scheduled on the same day the patient is
discharged from the hospital.
Bennett is designing automated scheduling mechanisms
that focus on improving nurse utilization and customer
service when creating nurse schedules. “Nurse utilization
can be improved by leveraging advanced routing heuristics
that use predictive information regarding expected future
patients when creating nurse schedules,” said Bennett. “By
decreasing the time that nurses spend traveling and waiting
between patient visits, the nurse has more time available to
visit patients. Customer service is improved by providing
patient visit schedules that are repeatable from week to
week.”
To ensure that theoretical components of their research
were grounded in providing solutions to problems
encountered in the real world by actual home health
agencies, Bennett and Erera partnered with Visiting
Nurse|Hospice Atlanta (VN|HA), the largest nonprofit
provider of home care in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Mark
Oshonock, President and CEO of VN|HA, states that “if nurse
utilization could be improved by 10 percent, or one half-visit
per day, we could visit an additional 1,200 patients per year
without increasing the size of our workforce.”
Because of the positive response from this project, VN|HA
has agreed to fund Bennett’s education after her fellowship
tenure expires.
Bennett earned her bachelor’s in industrial engineering
from the University of Arkansas in 2003. She became
interested in logistics during an undergraduate internship
with the Engineering Services department at the corporate
headquarters of J.B. Hunt Transport, LLC, in Lowell,
Arkansas. After receiving her master’s in industrial and
systems engineering from Virginia Tech in 2005, she came
to Georgia Tech to pursue a doctoral degree. Bennett will
graduate in December 2009 and has accepted a faculty
position with the University of Arkansas starting in
January 2010.
The Alumni Magazine for the Stewart School of ISyE Fall 2009 • 17