Improving operations management practices in home health care structures by using patients' activity projects

Abstract

There is a big challenge to ensure the continuity in the patient's care delivery process since the service provided to a patient may require several health professionals having various skills at different levels of planning. In order to provide care to patients admitted in a home health care structure, health professionals need a clear description and formalization of services that should be provided to patients according to their status (nature of service, implied resources ...). In practice, health professionals use the therapeutic project (i.e. care plan) in a strictly therapeutic objective, and there is no tool enabling the planning of operations pertaining to patients' care processes. To address this issue, we introduce in this paper, a broader concept: the patient's activity project. We describe how such an activity planning tool can be built, with a particular interest on the information it should contain. Then, we discuss how home health care structures can use it to manage operations in a more efficient way.