Application design proposal for home health services vehicle routing problem

A home health service as in many countries as well as Turkey is a public health service which has been newly started. Aging of the population, chronic diseases and disability has caused the demand for health services to increase. The increasing demand and health care costs have increased the need for home health services.In this study, one week actual and existing routes of Erzincan Home Health Care Unit were investigated within the scope of the study carried out with the Provincial Health Directorate. The current routes of the unit are coded in Java and Php languages based on the k-nearest neighbor algorithm in the heuristic solution algorithm group. A web based visual application was developed within the scope of the study. Thanks to this visual application, the order in which the unit will perform patient visits is determined and an application design has been proposed which allows performing all operations related to the patient at the presence of the patient.As a result of the re-determination of the routes of the unit with the developed software, it was observed that the tour could be completed with less distance and the personnel labor force could be saved, thus the increasing in the service time and quality allocated to the patients is observed.It is thought that the study will contribute to the relevant literature in terms of automatic determination of dynamic routes by using a heuristic solution algorithm and presenting the visual output of the route to the user.