Baptist Health

SUCCESS STORY

Baptist Health Jacksonville Saves Time Through Better Standards Using dRofus
Founded in 1955, Baptist Health is ranked as the “most preferred” health care 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 centers. They have more than 200 primary care and specialty physician practices, children’s specialty clinics, home health care, behavioral 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 Dir. Of Planning & Design, he immediately realized the need to create centralized design standards. At the time, Baptist Health did not have a comprehensive approach to standardized 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. “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.”

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 programs, 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 & 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.

“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 Dir. Of Planning & Design

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 program, 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 programs.

In addition to Room Templates, Baptist Health has consolidated their clinical and non-clinical equipment into a centralized Template Database. By capturing standardized equipment information such as manufactures, cost, and vital specification data, their procurement team has successfully transitioned from a labor-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 standardized 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.

“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 Dir. Of Planning & Design