Healthcare Design - December 2013 - 46

C CONSTRUCTION | 12.13
A BIM mandate
To alleviate challenges often encountered during design and construction of
new buildings at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the organization
adopted a BIM initiative to be used for all projects going forward
By Shrimant Jaruhar
Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH)
is an 894-bed academic medical center that's
part of Northwestern Medicine, with a 117-bed
community hospital in Lake Forest, Ill., and more
than 25 urban and suburban outpatient clinical
sites in and around Chicago. Combined, it has
more than 5 million square feet of managed space
and serves as the primary clinical affiliate of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
At any time, Northwestern Medicine has a
mix of renovation and new construction projects
underway.
The teams working on these projects are often
challenged during design and construction, due to
limited communication between members. In addition, the operators of these buildings are handed
over incomplete information on the building upon
completion and are unable to use the building
data that did exist during the project for ongoing
facility management.
To address these challenges, three years ago,
NMH released an enterprise mandate to use
building information modeling (BIM) for all projects
going forward. The first project that was required
to meet the mandate was the Outpatient Care Pavilion (OCP). The OCP is a 1-million-square-foot,
25-story building located in the hospital's downtown Chicago campus. It includes eight floors of
parking; six floors of imaging, outpatient surgery,
and institutes; and five floors of physicians' clinics.
It's slated to open in fall 2014.

nisms for the BIM process. The different uses
of the model were detailed along with modeling responsibilities and deliverables, and key
expectations to allow for a more integrated
project process are detailed, too.
Because expectations are set early and
clearly, the BEP is an ideal document to monitor BIM compliance. The following are some
of the metrics that help track the cost and
schedule savings:
t /VNCFSPGDPOþJDUTDMBTIFTGPVOEBOE
resolved prior to construction
t /VNCFSPGSFRVFTUTGPSJOGPSNBUJPO 3'*

t 3'*SFTQPOTFBOESFTPMVUJPOUJNF
t #VEHFUWBSJBODFGSPNTDIFNBUJDEFTJHO
to guaranteed maximum price
t 4DIFEVMFWBSJBODFGSPNFTUJNBUFUP
actual.
With the BEP in place, the OCP project
turned into a laboratory for optimizing BIM
processes on all future projects.
BIM for design communication
Before the BIM initiative, communication
between ownership and the design and
construction teams was conducted primarily
through 2-D documents, with limited integration of the team. Owing to its visualization
capabilities, BIM allows coordination problems
to be known earlier in the project process and
then helps the team to develop an informed
solution because of a better
understanding of the coordination problem.
Communication challenges
existed with staff, as well.
While department and area
managers were invited to
take part in planning meetings, it's challenging to get
physicians and nurses into a room to join the
end user discussion. A solution was found on
the OCP project by placing the BIM model on
an iPad with preset views that could be easily
accessed.
Combining the visualization and information
aspects of BIM with mobile technology allows

The new Outpatient Care Pavilion turned
into a laboratory for optimizing BIM
processes on all future Northwestern
Memorial Hospital projects.
Start with a plan
To enable successful use of BIM, a BIM addendum was added to the contracts with the architect
and the construction manager for the OCP. One
of the main ideas behind this addendum is that it
requires the project team to collaboratively create
a project-specific BIM execution plan (BEP). The
BEP sets out the steering and control mecha46

HCDmagazine.com 12.13

Shrimant Jaruhar

http://www.HCDmagazine.com

Healthcare Design - December 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Healthcare Design - December 2013