Tag: health

First Steps to Successful Deployment of BIM for Healthcare Operations

Luke Johnson

BIM always makes sense for Healthcare projects, and in my opinion BIM will eventually make total sense for FM and Building Operations.  I am deeply embedded in a few projects that are spanning across BIM, FM and Healthcare, and so I was especially interested in this whitepaper:

First Steps to Successful Deployment of BIM for Healthcare Operations

One particular comment really resonated with me, and I have copied it here below:

As Meghan Ruffo, contract BIM manager, Carolinas Health System, points out, tools can be added over time to process additional data. “Don’t think you have to have a perfect system set up to get started,” she advises. “Say you don’t have a space management system that integrates with Revit yet. You can still capture that information, and when you do implement that tool you will be ready to go.”

You can get the full whitepaper here: Download link

Using Copy Monitor to Extract Nested Families from Host Layouts and Create Free Instances

Luke Johnson

At various points in a BIM project, Revit models may get passed from one consultant or contractor to the next. After this handover occurs, a change in project requirements may mean that the recommended modelling practice has now slightly shifted. For example, in healthcare and hospital projects, host and nested Revit family arrangements are often used to control repeating layouts, such as in wet areas and other typical rooms.

Often, many of these nested fixture families are also Shared families, meaning they can be scheduled and accurately counted in Revit schedules.

However, what if a contractor needs access to some of these nested families in their own model? For example, what if a plumbing contractor wants to copy all nested plumbing fixtures into their own model, perhaps to add parameters or generate maintenance schedules for FM?

There are a few different ways to go here, with varying degrees of hackiness and/or gracefulness. An extremely hacky way to go might be to export IFC, open IFC to get each of these nested families as their own instances. Or, you could use Copy/Monitor. When using Batch Copy, each family gets emancipated from its original host family. It certainly should be used with care, as some things don’t work especially well… Like instance parameters aren’t really copied across, and you may end up with some duplicated elements. But for the most part, as a built-in Revit solution, it can do a decent job. I put together a brief workflow on how you might go about this process, and you can download it here.

As usual, test the workflow thoroughly before implementing it, and use at your own risk.

Oh, I wanted to mention yet another way this could be done… with Dynamo. I recently developed a solution that can free nested families for an entire rvt at once, including:

  • create new instances of all nested families of a desired category in correct locations
  • set original element IDs to original and new instances
  • set a parameter to determine if an element was ‘original’ or newly created by the script
  • rotate instances to match original
  • mirror or flip if necessary
  • copy all parameters from original elements to new instances
  • select top level elements for deletion

But that’s a subject for another post… 🙂

Hospital Design Whitepaper for Download

Luke Johnson

Synopsis:
This short paper sets out Andy Black‘s personal observations based upon four decades of working in the hospital world. 

Link
Download the full white paper ‘Notes on the design of hospitals and their clinical organisation’, from the Australian HealthCare Week site…

Direct link

via
A New Approach for the Design of Tomorrow’s Hospital – A2K Technologies Blog

BIM, Revit, FM and Health

Luke Johnson

Detailed and informative article re-published on AHDC (Australian Health Design Council) website. Quote (underlining is mine):
Managing the technology 
The post-occupancy incorporation of building data into an existing system long has been a tedious and error-prone process that now can be automated via the model’s geometry and data, if structured and formatted correctly. Health facility managers are seeing the value of BIM by integrating it into their existing computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and computer-aided facility management (CAFM) systems as well as energy or building management systems and electronic document management systems. By not limiting the application of BIM to simply a technology-to-technology interaction, the realistic outcomes that can be achieved by this type of workflow become evident. Often considered low-hanging fruit is BIM’s ability to integrate into a space management system. BIM applications such as San Rafael, Calif.-based Autodesk Inc.’s Revit Architecture are capable of tracking building spaces and easily categorizing that information into departmental areas as well as floor-to-floor or building-by-building breakdowns across a larger medical campus in both graphical and schedule-based interfaces. 

Also:
In its simplest terms, a model’s power to visualize space can contribute to staff and patient recruitment… BIM also can work to improve visitor wayfinding.

And the experience of Ohio State University and its 2D to 3D conversion for FM:
OSU began creating 3-D models of all the medical center buildings, helping the facilities team to understand its buildings and collaborate more effectively with the people who use them. OSU also has started using BIM in energy-use analysis and it is poised to play a key role in helping OSU to achieve its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050.

Now that the medical center has been modeled, BIM is allowing the university’s facility management group to support general space reporting and to mock up spaces in greater detail for more informed decision-making processes and for future project funding. Due to the success of the initiative, OSU decided to extend the BIM program to its main campus.
“The core benefit of BIM for us comes down to being able to make better, more cost-effective decisions faster,” says Joe Porostosky, senior manager of facilities information and technology services for OSU. “Ultimately, our facilities better meet the needs of users without as much time-consuming back-and-forth and expensive rework.”

Source:
BIM’s Role Expands as Health Facility Managers Take Ownership | Australian Health Design Council

 

Heads-up:

Performance Tips for Working with Very Large Datasets in Navisworks

Luke Johnson

When working across an entire healthcare facility and clashing combined NWDs, Navisworks may slow down to a crawl (we are talking single instance using 10gb RAM or more). Here are some tips to improve stability:

  • Make a “safe” home viewpoint inside a room somewhere, that won’t force Navis to draw the entire dataset in one window, and set some of the following as part of that viewpoint…
  • use Shaded View, not Full Render
  • Lights – Headlight
  • Don’t try and use Appearance Profiler if your dataset is large and your Appearance-related Search Sets are not at file level
  • When in Clash Detective, you can use the automatic Item 1 and 2 Highlighting instead of Appearances to visually examine clashing items
  • File Options – Clipping Planes – Near – Fixed at 0.1
  • File Options – Clipping Planes – Far- Fixed at 100 (or less if necessary)
  • Use Selection Tree instead of highly processor intensive Search Sets when possible
  • When appending a new model to an already huge dataset, you might get better results if you use the Project Browser. Import Sheets and Models -> bring the new model in and then after opening it and having a look, Append this model to your main model by right clicking in the Project Browser

Finally, I have found Navisworks 2015 to be much smoother and more reliable than previous versions. You can upgrade to 2015 and still downsave to 2013 for projects that require you to do so.

    Japanese Designers Collaborating on Complex and Advanced Hospital Design using BIM

    Luke Johnson

    Quotes:  
    Throughout the design and construction process, the project team used Building Information Modeling (BIM) solutions from Autodesk, including Autodesk Revit Architecture for 3D architectural design and project visualization, Autodesk Navisworks Manage for whole project visualization and coordination, AutoCAD for project documentation, and Autodesk 3ds Max Design for advanced 3D rendering and animation. 
    …  
    The team also used Navisworks Manage to perform formal clash detection. “For a building with such complex functions as this hospital, there is normally a great deal of rework that needs to be done during construction,” says Fujiki. “But on this project, Autodesk BIM software helped us identify and solve coordination issues during the design process. This helped reduce the amount of expensive rework during construction-improving construction efficiency and quality, which ultimately benefits our client.” 
    …  
    The project team also used Navisworks to evaluate construction logistics. For example, models of several large construction cranes were added to the Navisworks model to study crane placement. The crane arm was rotated to check the range of the crane and identify placements that involve the least amount of rotation. “The value of the Revit and Navisworks models increased as construction complexity increased,” reflects Hosoda. “Autodesk BIM solutions provided a more thorough grasp of the whole building and had a major impact on the understanding of the workers at the site.”
     

    Read the whole article:
    78717-First Experience with BIM Proves Highly Successful for Japanese Designers Collaborating on Complex and Advanced Hospital Design