Route Planning for Home Health Visits: How Nurses and Therapists Put a Day in Driving Order

To plan a home health route, decide which patients go on which day by area first, then put each day in order so the drive goes one way out from home and back. Fixed-time visits go in first and everything else fits around them. Most of the driving you can save is decided when you choose the day, not when you choose the order.

This guide is for the home health nurse, therapist or assistant who plans their own day. It covers how to group patients, how to order a day, what Google Maps and route apps do and do not do for a caseload, and what to know about drive time and mileage.

A note on who is writing. I'm an occupational therapist and the founder of Logicly, a home health scheduling app with route optimization. I say where it does a step for you; the method works with a paper map too.

The Short Answer

• Choose days by area. Each day covers one or two parts of your territory. Moving a patient from Tuesday to Thursday often saves more driving than any reordering.
• Place fixed-time visits first: insulin visits, wound care with a set time, patients with blocked times.
• Order the day as a loop: out from home, around, and back, without crossing the same road twice.
• Put the visit you can't move at the right end of the loop, not in the middle of a part of town you'll leave.
• Keep the miles. Each day's mileage is what your pay or reimbursement is figured from.

Step 1: Draw Your Zones

Look at where your patients live, not as a list but on a map. Most caseloads fall into three to five clusters: a few streets around a hospital, a suburb, a rural stretch along one highway. Give each cluster a name you'll recognize.

Now give each zone its days. If the north side has six patients who each need two visits a week, Monday and Thursday as "north days" covers them. A patient who needs three visits a week sits in a zone you visit three times, or travels with you to a neighbouring zone on the third day.

When a new patient comes on, put them in a zone before you put them on a day. It is the single habit that keeps a caseload from spreading across every day of the week.

Step 2: Place the Visits That Can't Move

Some visits have a time set by the care:

• Insulin visits for a patient who cannot self-inject and has no able and willing caregiver, which Medicare covers as daily skilled nursing (Benefit Policy Manual, chapter 7, section 40.1.3). These often need a set time of day.
• Wound care timed around a dressing schedule or another discipline's visit.
• Patients with blocked times: dialysis mornings, a day program, the hour a caregiver is home.
• Joint visits with a PTA, COTA or aide.

Put these in first. They are the fixed points the rest of the loop bends around.

Step 3: Order the Day as a Loop

With the day's patients chosen, the order is a small puzzle:

1. Start from home (or the office, if you start there).
2. Head for the farthest cluster first or last, not in the middle. Driving out to the far end at 8 am and working back toward home is usually shorter than zig-zagging.
3. Fit fixed-time visits where they fall. If a patient can only be seen after 1 pm, the loop has to reach their street in the afternoon, so plan which way round you go.
4. Put long visits where they don't block. A start of care or a recert takes longer than a routine visit. Put it where running over does not make you late for a fixed-time patient.
5. End near home when you can. The last drive home is usually unpaid.

What Google Maps and Route Apps Do

Most clinicians start with the maps app on their phone. Read on November 7, 2026, Google's help page for Maps on Android says you can add up to 9 stops, including the final destination, and describes reordering the stops by hand. It does not describe putting them in the shortest order for you, and it knows nothing about a patient's visit window or how long a visit takes. It is very good at the thing it is for: turn-by-turn directions to the next patient.

Consumer route planners for delivery drivers do order the stops, and some let you set a time window. What they don't know is home health: a patient's frequency, which days they have already been seen, that a recert has to fall in a 5-day window. They plan one day at a time; the week is still yours to work out. Before you type patient names into any of them, check whether the company signs a Business Associate Agreement, because a list of names, addresses and visit times is protected health information.

We compare the tools field clinicians actually use, including route planners, in the best home health apps for clinicians.

What a Home Health Scheduling App Adds

A home health scheduling app with route planning works from the caseload, not a list of addresses you type in each morning.

In Logicly, Optimize route on the Schedule page's Day view reorders the day's visits from your home address, your working hours and each patient's address. It lists every time that would change before anything moves, and a visit marked Lock this time stays where it is while the others fit around it. It never moves a visit to another day. If the visits and the drive don't fit in your working day, nothing moves, and Logicly tells you why. The Map page shows the day's stops in order with the minutes and miles of each leg and when to leave home, and its Caseload view shows where all your patients live, which is how you draw your zones. For directions, the Map button on a patient opens their address in the maps app you already use.

For the week, Auto-schedule week places the visits each patient still needs across your working days and puts each day in driving order. You can see it on sample patients without signing up.

Drive Time and Mileage

Two numbers come out of every route: the time you drove and the miles.

• Drive time between patients. For employees, federal wage rules count travel from one job site to another during the workday as hours worked (29 CFR 785.38). The drive from home to the first patient and from the last patient home is ordinarily not worktime. Per-visit pay does not change that rule; it changes how you check whether you were paid for it.
• Mileage. Agencies set their own reimbursement; federal law sets no home health rate. Many use the IRS business rate as a benchmark.

Our guide to mileage and travel-time pay for home health clinicians covers both, with the current IRS rate. Logicly counts each day's miles, and its Mileage page totals the month by how your agency pays the drive to your first patient and home from your last.

Key Takeaways

• Most of the driving you save is decided when you choose the day: group patients by area and give each area its days.
• Place fixed-time visits first, then order the day as one loop out from home and back.
• Put long visits where running over won't make you late for a fixed-time patient, and end near home when you can.
• Google Maps gives directions and lets you reorder up to 9 stops by hand on Android; it does not plan a caseload.
• Keep each day's miles. Drive time between patients is hours worked for employees under federal rules.

Frequently asked questions

How do home health nurses optimize their routes?

Plan the week by area first, so each day covers one or two parts of town. Then place the visits that have a fixed time, such as an insulin visit or a patient who can only be seen after 1 pm, and fit the rest around them so the drive goes one way from home and back, without crossing the same road twice. A route app or a home health scheduling app can order the stops; you decide which days and which patients go together.

Can Google Maps plan a route with all my home health visits?

Partly. On Android, Google Maps lets you add up to 9 stops, including the final destination, and its help page describes reordering them by hand, not putting them in the best order for you. It also knows nothing about a patient's time window or a visit's length. It is good for directions to the next patient; it does not plan the day.

Is drive time between home health patients paid?

For employees, federal wage rules say travel from one job site to another during the workday counts as hours worked (29 CFR 785.38). The drive from home to the first patient and from the last patient home is ordinarily not worktime. How per-visit pay and mileage handle this is set by your agency and state law; our guide to mileage and travel-time pay covers the details.

Does a route planner need to be HIPAA compliant?

If you put patient names, addresses or visit details in it on behalf of an agency, that is protected health information, and the agency's HIPAA duties reach the tools you use for it. Look for a vendor that signs a Business Associate Agreement. A general route planner used only with street addresses and no names carries less, but an address list with visit times still points to patients.

Sources

• 29 CFR 785.38 (opens in a new tab): travel that is part of the day's work counts as hours worked.
• CMS, Medicare Benefit Policy Manual, Chapter 7 (opens in a new tab), section 40.1.3: intermittent skilled nursing and the exception for daily insulin injections.
• Google Maps Help, "Add multiple destinations" (Android), read November 7, 2026.
• Related on this site: how to plan a week of home health visits, how to manage a home health caseload, the HIPAA checklist for home health.