Improving healthcare design with BIM-based tools

It is well known that the quality of healthcare facilities can contribute to health and wellbeing. Healthcare design is complex due to the large amount of information involved, with sometimes conflicting requirements which evolve over time. Therefore, strategies to deal with such complexity and volume of information is key. These include requirements from clients, stakeholders and regulations, structuring and storing design data and also verifying if design solutions are compliant to the briefing and to the regulatory framework. Despite the reported benefits of BIM, there are still gaps on the use of BIM tools in practice to support healthcare design. The aim of this paper is to discuss the benefits and limitations of commercially available BIM tools to support requirements management in general, and rule checking (also refered to as code checking, i.e. regulatory compliance checking) specifically. Design Science Research is the method adopted in this investigation. An empirical study was conducted in collaboration with an institution responsible for Primary Healthcare buildings in the UK. The results discuss the role that two tools (dRofus and Solibri Model Checker) have in supporting requirements management and code checking in healthcare design, their benefits and limitations. A framework is proposed, exploring relationships between the main features of the two BIM tools addressed in this paper and their potential impact on healthcare design. This paper demonstrates that improvements in healthcare design can be achieved by using BIM tools, which might benefit the quality of buildings designed and built, leading to positive health outcomes.