Qualitative assessment of a collaborative multi-user tool for enhancing the daily replanning and control of visits in Home Care services

Home Care (HC) refers to nurse visits and other services provided at patients’ homes rather than in hospitals or other health facilities. Planning human resources in HC is a complex activity, which includes several tasks and requires considering uncertain future patients’ demands. We focus on the daily rescheduling of nurse visits in HC, for which automatic optimization algorithms fail to provide efficient solutions able to react to stochastic events in real time. In these cases, the process must be driven by human decisions. To simplify human analysis, the responsibility of planners is separated through various criteria, e.g., a planner is in charge of a specific region and a pool of nurses. In addition, in case of complex decisions, planners collaborate to solve issues by exchanging nurses or acting on a territory they are not in charge of. In this paper, we consider a humancentered tool to support the daily rescheduling of nurse visits in HC, which is intended to be complementary to optimization algorithms. A prototype tool has been developed to provide a better support to collaboration, and it was demonstrated that this tool simplifies the perception of the replanning problem thanks to a new representation of data. In this paper, we present an improved tool that simplifies interactions, and we add a first qualitative assessment of the complexity levels that are managed.