Integrated mobility and healthcare capacity planning
PhD candidate: Yasamin Babaei
This PhD project examines how healthcare capacity planning can be improved by integrating mobility considerations into home healthcare systems. Embedded in the TRIAS (Triple Access System Planning) project, it addresses major challenges, including population ageing, rising care demand, workforce shortages, and travel inefficiencies. The research examines how physical mobility, spatial proximity, and digital connectivity can be integrated into healthcare planning to improve accessibility, efficiency, and quality of care.
The project focuses on hybrid home healthcare models that combine traditional home visits with nurse-led neighborhood centers and digital health solutions. It develops quantitative decision-support models at strategic, tactical, and operational levels, including long-term center opening and closing decisions under uncertain demand, patient assignment to home- or center-based care, caregiver routing and scheduling, synchronized visits involving multiple caregivers, and caregiver-centric capacity planning that accounts for workload balance, continuity of care, and work-setting preferences. It also investigates how digital health and remote monitoring can reduce unnecessary travel and improve coordination of in-person care.
Methodologically, the project combines stochastic optimization, dynamic facility planning, routing and scheduling models, and predictive analytics. The models are developed in collaboration with TRIAS field-lab partners, particularly Isala Hospital and Thuiszorg West-Brabant (TWB), to ensure practical relevance. Overall, the project contributes to the design of more accessible, sustainable, resilient, and patient-centered healthcare systems.
