One of the latest trends in the healthcare market is the industry-wide trend of moving toward design-build/assist instead of the traditional design-bid-build process. This process is used to increase efficiency and maintain quality through teamwork. As the design-build/assist process becomes more popular, so does the use of 3-D Modeling and BIM technology within that process. The Union Hospital project in Terre Haute that ERMCO, working with Sycamore Engineering out of Terre Haute, was a part of involved this design-assist approach.

Union Hospital's new 500,000-square-foot facility has many new features included that require everyone on the project team to work together to insure that installation and construction runs smoothly. Some of these unique features are brand new to the hospital market such as the use of flexible plastic tubing for water piping which allows for the pipes to curve and bend through tight spaces. Also, there is a radio frequency identification tag system for all nurses and doctors to provide easier documentation. The tags log each time a doctor or nurse enters a room and how much time they spend in the room. These are features which, if not coordinated properly during installation, can cause major issues once the hospital opens.

To help us work with the entire project team for Union Hospital, we relied on our construction services department and its team members’ capabilities with 3-D modeling. The general contractor, Garmong/Pepper, provided a 3-D model of the building for each of the specialty contractors to add their individual elements to. ERMCO Project Manager, Mike Summers, and Project Engineer, Casey Rains, worked with construction services to add every piece of electrical installation design into the model.

The advantage of the 3-D model is it provides a 360 degree view of every component in a space allowing any problems that might arise during installation to be caught ahead of time. While this takes a little bit of extra up-front time to insert the components into the model, it pays off when it comes to the actual construction of the project and field efficiency. An issue that could take days to fix when discovered during actual installation can be resolved sometimes in a matter of minutes when found with the 3-D model. This also increases teamwork by getting everyone on the project coming together ahead of time to work out those problems.

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