Addressing Home Healthcare Staffing Challenges Through Geo-Intelligent Scheduling.

Schwartz, Larry S

Industries that face challenges in staffing and scheduling have successfully addressed these issues through the implementation of intraday staffing automation. Home healthcare, however, introduces an additional dimension: location-specifically, efficiently scheduling the appropriate healthcare worker based on their projected location at a given time with the location of a patient who needs care. Geo-Intelligent Scheduling has the potential to effectively address the unique staffing/scheduling challenges in home healthcare: the ability to get the right clinician to the right patient at the right location at the right time by taking into account the real-time location of the patient and clinician throughout the day. Geo-Intelligent Scheduling also has the potential to automatically create route-optimized intraday schedules for clinicians and increase effective staffing capacity by over 16% with no additional labor cost. Finally, Geo-Intelligent Scheduling can potentially improve appointment-time adherence, automate Electronic Visit Verification compliance, enhance patient/clinician communication, and improve employee retention through self-scheduling empowerment.