---
title: "Routing home health care for an ageing population"
description: "Home health care, nurse scheduling and workforce scheduling appear on only 15 recent papers in the operations research and AI journals. Ageing countries are moving care from hospitals and nursing homes into homes, which turns nurses into a vehicle fleet. How much travel and overtime can better routing save, and do the plans respect continuity of care?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/routing-home-health-care
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/routing-home-health-care.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Routing home health care for an ageing population: Home health care, nurse scheduling and workforce scheduling appear on only 15 recent papers in the operations research and AI journals."
date: "2026-10-26"
updated: "2026-10-26"
status: "seed"
tags: ["operations research", "healthcare", "logistics"]
keywords: ["nurse scheduling", "home health care"]
---

# Routing home health care for an ageing population

Home health care, nurse scheduling and workforce scheduling appear on only 15 recent papers in the operations research and AI journals. Ageing countries are moving care from hospitals and nursing homes into homes, which turns nurses into a vehicle fleet. How much travel and overtime can better routing save, and do the plans respect continuity of care?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 15 papers carry a nurse-scheduling, home-health-care, workforce-scheduling or staff-rostering keyword (11 in operations research journals, 4 in AI): "workforce scheduling" on 7, "home health care" on 5, "nurse scheduling" on 5. The [operating room](/ideas/operating-room-scheduling) and [ambulance](/ideas/ambulance-dispatch-and-emergency-care) problems get more attention than care delivered at home, which is where demand is growing fastest.

## Questions

- In real home care operations, how much travel time and overtime do optimized routes save compared with planners' routes?
- How much does keeping the same nurse with the same patient (continuity of care) cost in efficiency, and does it improve outcomes?
- Do the models capture what makes plans fail in practice: cancellations, traffic, visits that run long?

## Data that could help

Visit logs with planned and actual times from home care providers, nurse rosters, and patient outcomes such as readmissions.

## Next step

Partner with a home care provider and re-plan one month of visits with a published routing model, measuring travel savings and changes in continuity of care.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| nurse scheduling | 1 | #2881 | 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 | 14 |
| home health care | 1 | #2881 | 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 2, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1 | 24 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Routing home health care for an ageing population. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/routing-home-health-care

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-routing-home-health-care,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Routing home health care for an ageing population},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/routing-home-health-care}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).