A reinforcement learning approach for the online dynamic home health care scheduling problem.

IF 2.3 3区 医学 Q2 HEALTH POLICY & SERVICES
Quy Ta-Dinh, Tu-San Pham, Minh Hoàng Hà, Louis-Martin Rousseau
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Over recent years, home health care has gained significant attention as an efficient solution to the increasing demand for healthcare services. Home health care scheduling is a challenging problem involving multiple complicated assignments and routing decisions subject to various constraints. The problem becomes even more challenging when considered on a rolling horizon with stochastic patient requests. This paper discusses the Online Dynamic Home Health Care Scheduling Problem (ODHHCSP), in which a home health care agency has to decide whether to accept or reject a patient request and determine the visit schedule and routes in case of acceptance. The objective of the problem is to maximize the number of patients served, given the limited resources. When the agency receives a patient's request, a decision must be made on the spot, which poses many challenges, such as stochastic future requests or a limited time budget for decision-making. In this paper, we model the problem as a Markov decision process and propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms other algorithms in the literature in terms of solution quality. In addition, a constant runtime of less than 0.001 seconds for each decision makes the approach especially suitable for an online setting like our problem.

在线动态家庭保健调度问题的强化学习方法。
近年来,家庭医疗保健作为一种有效的解决方案,在满足日益增长的医疗保健服务需求方面获得了极大的关注。家庭医疗调度是一个具有挑战性的问题,涉及多个复杂的分配和路由决策,并受到各种约束条件的限制。如果考虑到滚动范围和随机病人请求,这个问题就变得更具挑战性。本文讨论的是在线动态家庭医疗调度问题(ODHHCSP),在该问题中,家庭医疗机构必须决定是否接受或拒绝病人的请求,并在接受请求的情况下确定访问日程和路线。该问题的目标是在资源有限的情况下最大限度地增加服务病人的数量。当医疗机构收到病人的请求时,必须当场做出决定,这就带来了许多挑战,如未来请求的随机性或决策时间预算的有限性。在本文中,我们将该问题建模为马尔可夫决策过程,并提出了一种强化学习(RL)方法。实验结果表明,所提出的方法在解决方案质量方面优于文献中的其他算法。此外,每次决策的运行时间恒定在 0.001 秒以内,这使得该方法特别适合像我们的问题这样的在线环境。
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来源期刊
Health Care Management Science
Health Care Management Science HEALTH POLICY & SERVICES-
CiteScore
7.20
自引率
5.60%
发文量
40
期刊介绍: Health Care Management Science publishes papers dealing with health care delivery, health care management, and health care policy. Papers should have a decision focus and make use of quantitative methods including management science, operations research, analytics, machine learning, and other emerging areas. Articles must clearly articulate the relevance and the realized or potential impact of the work. Applied research will be considered and is of particular interest if there is evidence that it was implemented or informed a decision-making process. Papers describing routine applications of known methods are discouraged. Authors are encouraged to disclose all data and analyses thereof, and to provide computational code when appropriate. Editorial statements for the individual departments are provided below. Health Care Analytics Departmental Editors: Margrét Bjarnadóttir, University of Maryland Nan Kong, Purdue University With the explosion in computing power and available data, we have seen fast changes in the analytics applied in the healthcare space. The Health Care Analytics department welcomes papers applying a broad range of analytical approaches, including those rooted in machine learning, survival analysis, and complex event analysis, that allow healthcare professionals to find opportunities for improvement in health system management, patient engagement, spending, and diagnosis. We especially encourage papers that combine predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve decision making and health care outcomes. The contribution of papers can be across multiple dimensions including new methodology, novel modeling techniques and health care through real-world cohort studies. Papers that are methodologically focused need in addition to show practical relevance. Similarly papers that are application focused should clearly demonstrate improvements over the status quo and available approaches by applying rigorous analytics. Health Care Operations Management Departmental Editors: Nilay Tanik Argon, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Bob Batt, University of Wisconsin The department invites high-quality papers on the design, control, and analysis of operations at healthcare systems. We seek papers on classical operations management issues (such as scheduling, routing, queuing, transportation, patient flow, and quality) as well as non-traditional problems driven by everchanging healthcare practice. Empirical, experimental, and analytical (model based) methodologies are all welcome. Papers may draw theory from across disciplines, and should provide insight into improving operations from the perspective of patients, service providers, organizations (municipal/government/industry), and/or society. Health Care Management Science Practice Departmental Editor: Vikram Tiwari, Vanderbilt University Medical Center The department seeks research from academicians and practitioners that highlights Management Science based solutions directly relevant to the practice of healthcare. Relevance is judged by the impact on practice, as well as the degree to which researchers engaged with practitioners in understanding the problem context and in developing the solution. Validity, that is, the extent to which the results presented do or would apply in practice is a key evaluation criterion. In addition to meeting the journal’s standards of originality and substantial contribution to knowledge creation, research that can be replicated in other organizations is encouraged. Papers describing unsuccessful applied research projects may be considered if there are generalizable learning points addressing why the project was unsuccessful. Health Care Productivity Analysis Departmental Editor: Jonas Schreyögg, University of Hamburg The department invites papers with rigorous methods and significant impact for policy and practice. Papers typically apply theory and techniques to measuring productivity in health care organizations and systems. The journal welcomes state-of-the-art parametric as well as non-parametric techniques such as data envelopment analysis, stochastic frontier analysis or partial frontier analysis. The contribution of papers can be manifold including new methodology, novel combination of existing methods or application of existing methods to new contexts. Empirical papers should produce results generalizable beyond a selected set of health care organizations. All papers should include a section on implications for management or policy to enhance productivity. Public Health Policy and Medical Decision Making Departmental Editors: Ebru Bish, University of Alabama Julie L. Higle, University of Southern California The department invites high quality papers that use data-driven methods to address important problems that arise in public health policy and medical decision-making domains. We welcome submissions that develop and apply mathematical and computational models in support of data-driven and model-based analyses for these problems. The Public Health Policy and Medical Decision-Making Department is particularly interested in papers that: Study high-impact problems involving health policy, treatment planning and design, and clinical applications; Develop original data-driven models, including those that integrate disease modeling with screening and/or treatment guidelines; Use model-based analyses as decision making-tools to identify optimal solutions, insights, recommendations. Articles must clearly articulate the relevance of the work to decision and/or policy makers and the potential impact on patients and/or society. Papers will include articulated contributions within the methodological domain, which may include modeling, analytical, or computational methodologies. Emerging Topics Departmental Editor: Alec Morton, University of Strathclyde Emerging Topics will handle papers which use innovative quantitative methods to shed light on frontier issues in healthcare management and policy. Such papers may deal with analytic challenges arising from novel health technologies or new organizational forms. Papers falling under this department may also deal with the analysis of new forms of data which are increasingly captured as health systems become more and more digitized.
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