Mobile health services for rubal areas in Turkey : a case study for Burdur

Abstract

Currently, healthcare services in urban areas are provided by family health centers coordinated by community health centers. By the application of family physician based system, it is planned to provide mobile healthcare services (MHS) for the people living in the rural areas which have difficulties to reach those health centers in urban areas. In the scope of these ongoing studies, family physicians procure primary health services to the determined villages in between defined time periods. The aim of this project is to schedule a working plan by using family physicians’ mobile healthcare service times effectively. In this context, when the problem was examined, we realized that it has similarities with the periodic vehicle routing problem (PVRP). We proposed several different solution approaches to the PVRP in the context of the mobile healthcare services application that we are interested in. We tested the implementation of our proposed solution approaches using both simulated data and extended data obtained from the villages of Burdur city