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Vaximap.org: optimal routes for home visits |
So far, 65,516 routes have been built for 708,132 patients.
We are funded by Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, with technical services provided by Microsoft Bing.
How it works
This is a tool for finding the fastest routes to visit a set of housebound patients.
- Upload a 2-column spreadsheet containing patient identifiers and locations (eg postcodes).
- Choose a cluster size (number of patients to group together), for example the number of vaccine doses in a vial.
- The patients are sorted into clusters based on proximity to each other and the optimal route found within each.
Check out the example here, or download the dataset and try it for yourself.
How to use this tool
- The spreadsheet must have one patient per row, with a maximum of 300.
- Patient IDs can be any mix of numbers or characters eg "1A2B3C", and they should not be identifying (the numbers 1,2,3,... work just fine)
- Locations can be street names and towns, postcodes, zipcodes; anything that you could type into Bing Maps. In the UK, postcodes must be used.
- If the first row contains column names eg "name, postcode", skip them: set the first patient row to 2.
- The cluster size must be between 3 and 25, for example the number of vaccine doses in a vial.
- All patients will be allocated to a cluster, but not all the clusters will be the same size (some may be smaller than the limit).
- If you open one of the routes in Google maps on desktop, you can then send it to your phone via text or email.
- Each route can be made into a round trip by providing a start/end address.
Build your routes