  Nursing homes (NHs) are critical healthcare infrastructures for caring frail
older adults with 24/7 formal care and personal assistance. Adequate NH
resource planning is of great importance to ensure desired quality of care and
resident outcomes yet challenging. The challenge lies in the heterogeneous
service demand of NH residents, due to the varied individual characteristics,
the diverse dwelling duration with multiple competing discharge dispositions,
and the diverse service need. Existing healthcare staffing literature often
assumed a homogeneous population of NH residents and neglected the complexity
of service demand heterogeneity. This work proposes an analytics-based modeling
framework with a user-friendly decision support platform for NH resource
planning. The proposed framework characterizes the heterogeneous service demand
of NH residents via novel integration of advanced statistical modeling,
computer simulation and optimization techniques. We further provide a case
study using real data from our industrial collaborator to demonstrate the
effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed work. The impacts of
service utilization heterogeneity and service need heterogeneity on resource
planning decisions are investigated as well.
