The structural challenges faced by home care planning grow as the population in a municipality ages. Service levels should be constantly raised without unreasonable increases in expenditure. In Kuusamo, the serious nature of the situation became apparent last year and a search for a solution was instigated. Manual shift and route planning was hard and it didn’t seem t provide customers with equal access to services. Home care supervisor Maarit Määttä says a part of the problem is that home care is constantly preparing for peak hours. ”This means that resources are taken at the wrong time, when people are on shift ‘just in case’.” The human factor poses a problem, too. ”Achieving equality in planning is hard when the customers are all people with their varied needs. Everyone still has the right to the same care – this is why an objective planning tool is so important that, on top of it all, actually improves the quality of the care provided for customers.”
Kuusamo solved their problem with the AI-based optimisation produced by Procomp from Oulu. First Procomp produced a scenario optimisation that helped define a number of concrete ways in which to improve home care planning. Based on the experience with the consulting services, a contract for continuous optimisation was signed last February. Artificial intelligence allows the optimisation system to process vast amounts of data and calculate a home care plan that covers the coming weeks. The plan is also optimised daily, as changes take place.
Maarit Määttä is very satisfied with the results. ”Our working culture has undergone the biggest change. Our work has become more visible and sensible. We can take into consideration what are the most important tasks from the customer’s point of view and when they have to be performed.” In practice this means that one nurse has been taken off morning duty and some tasks have been moved to the evening shift, which wasn’t an option before. ”We used to have to prepare for a morning rush that didn’t necessarily materialise. Now we can plan the time we spend at the customer’s so that time critical tasks are performed at a certain point and longer house calls can be made outside of peak hours. We’re able to offer better quality with fewer resources, which seems unbelievable. Without optimisation by Procomp, this would not have been possible,” Maarit Määttä states.
What is AI-based optimisation?
AI-based optimisation refers to a logistics system that uses available data to calculate an optimal result as a function of time, place, resources and costs. In the case of home care, customer care plans, staff competencies and other relevant information is factored in.
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