When it comes to obtaining a regulatory green light in the rule-filled world of building hospitals, a Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach can make it happen faster and with more clarity. Based on CO Architects' ongoing experience in a pathbreaking California state program—which used the 741,000-square-foot Palomar Medical Center West (PMCW) in northern San Diego County as its pilot construction project (figure 1)—a design and construction team using BIM has been able to improve and accelerate the regulatory approval process for new hospital construction. Bottom line? We estimate that the regulatory approval process on the structural engineering portion of the hospital was sped up by nine months.
Palomar Medical Center West in northern San Diego County is currently under construction
As widely noted, BIM has already stimulated the “Integrated Project Delivery” model for owners, design professionals, and builders, and is now opening a window for bringing regulatory agencies into the mix. It collapses what was once an iterative and sequential decision-making exercise into an information-rich and easier-to-understand process, with much more simultaneity. In keeping with the integrated team's motto—where transparency and trust go together—well-informed regulators are happy regulators.
The regulatory circumstance
In California, the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) is the code enforcement agency, and whether in fact or by “urban legend,” OSHPD plan-checking and field inspection duties represent a goodly portion of a project's schedule. But, to be fair, the pre-BIM integration, all-at-one-time plan-check submittal and review process is an onerous and time-consuming effort for any entity. Pre-BIM integration, regulators had to interpret codes and standards in one clump, and then re-review the resulting inevitable changes in the planning and design of the project in other clumps.
Also, the field phase inspection process was (and still can be) fraught with opportunities for variations between permitted design documents and contractor-induced “innovations.” In other words, pre-BIM integration, the permitted documents might not match up with the built version, leading to a redo cycle of redocumentation and rechecking. The feared “do-redo” cycles could emerge, costing countless hours, and throwing monkey-wrenches into planned synchronized work schedules.
The opportunity of BIM
Happily, BIM integration allows for earlier integration of the design and construction team's input, thereby providing earlier design progress for regulatory review—reviews that realistically consider the variables of trade practices, of manufacturer-specific configurations and performance characteristics, and of constructability conditions. Thus, BIM allows for earlier involvement of OSHPD before the design and construction teams spend thousands of hours in the documentation and planning process. The expected result at PMCW (which is currently under construction, is a radical reduction, if not an elimination, of the risks of untimely and expensive OSHPD field-enforcement resolutions.
Moreover, with BIM integration, contractors can contribute early to the BIM “virtual” information pool, allowing for designer incorporation and immediate regulatory review. This is contrasted with the pre-BIM historical “preconstruction services,” when the trade contractors often found themselves unable to contribute to the constantly evolving design stew, and thus relegated to incorporation of trade variables at the jobsite. That is when regulators would discover discrepancies between plans and built reality.
Palomar Medical Center West
CO Architects uses BIM from the earliest conceptual study forward. The PMCW project, specifically, was therefore virtually three-dimensional from the start, and information-laden with parameters for analysis and tracking. When BIM is further utilized in the context of an integrated project delivery model, CO Architects and its engineering consultants provide early and continuous access to the BIM files for all participating parties, including regulators.
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