dRofus is helping to improve planning and operation of existing and new facilities across an extensive healthcare estate
Founded in 1955, Baptist Health is ranked as the “most preferred” healthcare provider in Jacksonville, Florida. Baptist consists of five hospitals and the region’s only children’s hospital with 1,190 beds and multiple campuses and medical centres. They have more than 200 primary care and specialty physician practices, children’s specialty clinics, home healthcare, behavioural health, occupational health, rehabilitation services and urgent care. Baptist currently has over 12,400 employees.
Where to begin?
When Matthew Bode AIA joined Baptist Health in 2019 as the system director of planning and design, he immediately realised the need to create centralised design standards.
At the time, Baptist Health did not have a comprehensive approach to standardised design resources such as equipment standards or templated room layouts. Nor did they have a long-term solution for managing and sharing their documentation with design and construction teams.
“dRofus allows us to do quick project planning. I can develop a program and get a snapshot in 20 minutes of what a project will cost. What used to take days now takes minutes.” – Matthew Bode, AIA, System director of planning and design
“As an architect, when there’s no information, you ask 1,000 questions. Now, as the owner, I’ll have 10 projects with 10 architects, each asking 1,000 questions, many of which are the same. I needed a way to just hand them everything,” Matt said.
In addition to providing valuable design resources to his consultants, Matt’s team is also responsible for doing feasibility studies, initial project planning and equipment procurement. He was looking for a tool to help his team generate function programmes, conceptual designs and project budgets efficiently without the expense of hiring external architects or contractors prior to project approval. This meant any standards he created needed to be accessible and easy to use both internally and by consultants.
Matt’s background as an architect inspired him to put a plan in place and with his exposure to dRofus in the past, he knew he had a solution. Baptist Health started with a dRofus-led workshop that brought representatives together from their internal planning and design, equipment procurement, construction and facilities operations teams. The result was an implementation roadmap to support goals for the use of dRofus focused on their existing facilities and goals for any new construction.
It all starts with templates
A key feature Baptist Health leveraged is dRofus’ Room Templates. They currently have approximately 570 room templates using the FGI (Facility Guidelines Institute) Guidelines to consolidate programme, equipment, architectural design and building system requirements in one convenient place. These are central to Matt’s goals of increasing efficiency in planning new projects and documenting Baptist Health’s existing facility programmes.
“Knowing there’s a place to put everything motivated me to actually create standards. Before dRofus, standards were too hard to manage” – Matthew Bode, AIA, System director of planning and design
In addition to Room Templates, Baptist Health has consolidated its clinical and non-clinical equipment into a centralised Template Database. By capturing standardised equipment information such as manufactures, cost and vital specification data, their procurement team has successfully transitioned from a labour-intensive workflow of comparing project-specific bid documents against a master equipment list in Excel to automatically pulling equipment lists out of dRofus based on their room templates and over 1,100 standardised pieces of equipment. These equipment lists have proven invaluable for generating quick and accurate cost estimates as well as providing a quality checked source for procurement.
Building a virtual campus
One of Matt’s other challenges was moving Baptist Health from 2D CAD to BIM both for new construction and to help document their existing facilities. With dRofus, his team has streamlined their process of building a virtual campus. Because of the live connection between dRofus and Revit, they have successfully documented existing departmental programmes in dRofus connected to their models, giving them a centralised database of their existing facilities. This information is essential to the management of existing facilities and running various reports.
According to Matt: “Before dRofus, it was a three- to four-month process to develop accurate system-wide cost centre maps to report departmental areas for audits. Now this has been reduced to a few clicks.”
Centralised standards are paying off
Baptist Health’s goal to streamline its planning efforts through templated design and building a virtual campus has paid off. Whether Matt is planning a minor renovation in an existing building or developing a function programme for a new project, dRofus has transformed how his team plans projects and shares information with their consultants.
“dRofus allows us to do quick project planning. I can develop a programme and get a snapshot in 20 minutes of what a project will cost. What used to take days now takes minutes,” Matt said.
And with all of a project’s information in a single database, Baptist Health has also streamlined how they onboard architects. Now they just invite consultants to join their dRofus project, where they have instant access to everything they need from room quantities, sizes and design requirements to all planned equipment ready to be connected to their Revit models for design. All are generated from centralised standards, giving Baptist Health and their consultants assurance that they are working from the most current information.
Process improvement using dROFUS
Existing facilities
- Document approx. 7.5m sq ft of building programme across 80+ buildings.
- Connect to Revit facility models for future project planning.
- Generate space reports for audits.
- Assist facility operations to improve accuracy of information.
New construction
- Manage design standards to share with design and construction teams.
- Develop feasibility studies and plan new projects.
- Validate designs to ensure standards are met.
- Improve handover at completion and connection to facility operations systems.
*Please note: This is a contributor profile.
Dr. Roberto Schiera
Sales Representative EMEA
M:+49 0162 9438573
E: roberto.schiera@drofus.com
Twitter: @drofus
