Patients with Special Needs

Product Used: Route Optimization API

Background

An NEMT provider needs to pick-up patients from their homes and take them to their respective hospitals at scheduled times. These patients suffer from different challenges which require special capabilities like, wheelchair accessible ramps, stretchers, trained assistants on board, to carry them.

The NEMT provider operates a small fleet of mixed-capability vehicles, including standard vans, wheelchair-accessible vans and ventilator-compatible vans. He also has trained drivers and attendants to help patients with special needs.

Problem Statements

The NEMT provider wants to:

1. Ensure that each patient is matched to the right van based on proximity and special capabilities required to onboard a patient. Failing to meet special needs of patients could lead to patient safety risks with regulatory consequences, cancellations of contracts or partnerships due to questionable service reliability among other negative impacts.
2. Optimize routes to minimize fuel costs due to rising prices.

Solution

NextBillion.ai’s Route Optimization API’s dynamic routing capabilities can be leveraged to assign the right vehicles to patients with specific needs without sacrificing the route efficiency. The optimizer takes into account the vehicle capabilities and proximity to the patient’s pickup location to create a route plan which balances efficiency and service-level agreements (SLAs).

Match patients to right vans

Let’s first classify the types of special needs that are required for vans / drivers in order to carry the patients scheduled for the day.

Next, we will specify these skill codes in the individual “shipments” to indicate the special needs of each patient. As per our skill codes,

• “skills” : [101] indicates the patient suffers from mobility challenges and would need to be assigned to a van with wheelchair accessible ramp.
• “skills” : [102, 103] indicates that the patient needs oxygen support as well as assistants from trained professionals during the trip.

On the other hand, we add the necessary skill codes for each of our vans to indicate which special capabilities they possess.

• “skills” : [101, 102] indicates that a van has both wheelchair accessible ramps as well as trained assistants on board.
• “skills” : [104] indicates that a van has only stretcher support and no other capabilities.

Once these skills are configured for all patients and vehicles, the optimizer will assign a van to pick-up only those patients whose special needs it can serve. In case a patient requires more than one type of special assistance, the van should possess all of those capabilities.

Minimize fuel costs

In order to minimize the fuel cost we need to minimize the total distance that the vans drive for. This can be ensured by setting the distance to be considered as the travel_cost of the solution.

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"options": {  
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       "objective": {  
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           "travel_cost": "distance"  
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           }  
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       }

Sample request and solution

Here is a full sample JSON request that we built for this case and the corresponding response

API Request

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curl --location 'https://api.nextbillion.io/optimization/v2?key=<your_api_key>'   
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--header 'Content-Type: application/json'   
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--data '{...}'

API Response

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{
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    "description": "Patient special needs",  
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    "result": "{...}",
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    "status": "Ok",  
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    "message": ""  
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}

From the solution, we can observe that all the patients are accurately matched to the right vans which can serve all their special needs, while reaching the treatment center on time. The overall distance traveled by the vans is also optimized by taking the best possible routes to reduce the fuel consumption.