Estimating patient demand progression in home care: a Bayesian modeling approach

Home Care (HC) service consists of providing care to patients at their own home, without the necessity of bringing them to hospitals or nursing homes. Planning human resources is a difficult task and, for a good quality of planning, knowledge of future demands for visits from patients is required. The aim of this paper is to propose a methodology for estimating and predicting the demand for care by HC patients in terms of number of visits required in a defined time slot. Two models are proposed and validated considering the real data of one of the largest public HC providers in Italy. Results show the applicability of the approach in the practice and a good quality of the predicted number of visits.