By Healthcare Facilities Today

With more than 5 million square feet of managed space, Northwestern Medicine has a mix of renovation and new construction projects underway at any given time.

The teams working on these projects are often hampered during design and construction by limited communication between members. 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, according to an article on the Healthcare Design magazine website.

To address these challenges, three years ago, Northwestern Memorial Hospital released an enterprise mandate to use building information modeling (BIM) for all future projects, the article said. 

The first BIM-mandated project was the Outpatient Care Pavilion (OCP). A BIM addendum was added to the contracts with the architect and the construction manager. It requires the project team to create a project-specific BIM execution plan (BEP). According to the article, the BEP sets out the steering and control mechanisms for the BIM process.

The OCP, slated to open in fall 2014, is a 1-million-square-foot, 25-story building 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.

Read the article.