243: Your Firm Is an Institution

TRXL

This episode explores the shift toward data-driven design in healthcare architecture, highlighting how firms can move away from treating every project as a blank

Key takeaways

• Espy Harper and David Spihar estimate that approximately 90% of healthcare room data is reusable across projects when properly templated.
• A bidirectional live link between a central requirements database (Durofus) and a 3D planning environment (Hypar) allows equipment changes to ripple through affected rooms instantly.

Main topics

• Data-driven healthcare design
• Institutional knowledge management

Notable quotes

"It blows my mind that we treat every project like it's the first project we've ever done."

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that modernizing architectural workflows through structured data and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Welcome to the Troxel podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode, I'm hosting a panel on data-driven design for healthcare, which is arguably one of the most difficult building types architects can take on. Hospitals are a strange mix of scales. You can be arguing about which floor the OR goes on in the same week somebody realizes the drawer on a medication dispensing machine needs more than three feet to open. Every one of these details matters, and most of them live in spreadsheets, PDFs, and the heads of a few senior planners. My guests come at the problem from three different seats. S.B. Harper is the innovation leader and an associate principal at LS3P with more than 25 years as a healthcare planner. David Spihar is the regional sales manager for the Americas at Drophos and a self-described recovering architect who's been chasing this data problem since the early days of BIM. And Anthony Houck is co-founder and chief product officer at Hypar. after spending a decade at Autodesk working on Revit and generative design tools. In this episode, we get into why most firms treat every project like the first one they've ever done, how much of a hospital's room data can be templated from job to job, and what happens when a single equipment change in a database ripples through 150 rooms in a model. We talk about bringing nurses and department heads into the design conversation at a scale they understand. why a trash can request can derail a user group meeting, and who should own this kind of data that's produced along the way once the building goes into occupancy and operation. I think one of the biggest takeaways in this episode is that data-driven design is mostly about people. Espy and David both say that roughly 90 % of room information is reusable, and that buys back time for the part architects got into this for. And it lets a client see that what they said three months ago in a user group meeting was heard and written down. There is a lot more to this episode. You can find it in the show notes. So be sure to check that out over at TRXL.co. As always, please share this episode with anyone you think needs to hear it. And special thanks to Drophis and Hypar for making this episode possible. So without further ado, here's my conversation with S.B. Harper, David Spihar, and Anthony Houck. All right. Great to have you all here. This is going to be a great conversation about data-driven design. So, Espy, if you could just give the audience a little bit about you, and then we'll jump to Anthony and then to David. Speaker 1 (2:20) Thanks, Evan. I am Espy Harper. I have been practicing healthcare planning for over 25 years and have become that person who likes to push the buttons and find out if we could do this or what if, and ask a lot of questions. And that's led me down a road to a position that's called the innovation leader for the firm LS3P. And it's been a wild rollercoaster ride. What it really means is I'm looking at how we make our firm more innovative and stay relevant with all the upcoming changes. So it's really exciting. Speaker 3 (2:58) Nice. All right, Anthony, over to you. Speaker 2 (3:01) I'm Anthony Houck, and I'm the co-founder with Ian Keogh of Hypar, and I am the chief product officer of the company. And we make software for architectural and design and for space planning, especially for healthcare. Speaker 3 (3:18) And this is Anthony's, I mean, you've been on the podcast before at least once, but it's been a while. At Speaker 2 (3:23) least once before, yeah. Speaker 3 (3:24) Yeah, all right. And then Hypar has been on the show before Ian. Andrew, and yeah, it's been great having you back. So, David, your turn. Speaker 4 (3:33) Yeah, I'm David Spihar with Durofus. So, I am actually a recovering architect. So, I practiced architecture for many years, was an early adopter of BIM technology, and went from architecture to implementing design technology in a couple of large architecture firms. And then several years ago, I joined Arofis and I am the regional sales manager for the Americas. So I kind of have a pretty long history of trying to use innovative technologies to personally, it was to make my life easier. And I'm like, if I can make my life easier, then I can make other people's lives easier, too. So it was self-serving. Speaker 3 (4:12) How's that recovery going, David? You know what? It's wonderful. Speaker 4 (4:16) Oh, it's old enough. Yeah. Speaker 2 (4:18) And Speaker 4 (4:19) actually, it's really funny when I have conversations with customers and they talk about, you know, the same challenges that I faced 20 some years ago, they're still facing today. I'm like, man, I'm sorry. All right. Well, I was surprised Speaker 3 (4:35) to read that hospitals. So, Espy, I'm looking for your confirmation here. Hospitals are the most difficult building type to do. I mean, arguably, there's there's. It's one of the most complex, right? And it's also 14 % of AIA billings, which means there's a lot of hospitals to do. Give us a little bit of background on this project type before we jump into kind of the data-driven aspect of it. Speaker 1 (5:01) I think what's important to understand is when you're designing a hospital, you know, it's the constant back and forth of the macro issues and the micro issues. Speaker 1 (5:14) You'd be surprised that when you are in construction and you are about to upfit a room, you know, drywall's in, and you're trying to put equipment in that space, and then you realize that it takes more than three feet to open the drawer on a medications dispensing machine, right? And that the average nurse is not like the characters on The Devil Wears Prada, right? They're normal size women and men. And so you get into these spaces and you say, aha, this was a design misstep. Speaker 3 (5:51) And Speaker 1 (5:52) then you think about the consequences of that design misstep. It's not like at home when your couch doesn't fit, you know, you can kind of move it around or put a plant in front of it to disguise what you don't want people to see. This is a matter of time and constraints. on a flow that's all about positive outcomes for patients. And so everything matters, where the outlet goes, how high it is, what's the material, how will it hold up, how fast can we get to folks? You know, all of it is coordinated like a beautiful symphony across all of the disciplines. And I think that's really where the complexity comes in, but also the pressure and the responsibility to do the right things by the patients and the caregivers. Speaker 3 (6:38) So, yeah, I mean, I was out here and you zoomed into the outlets. Right. But but it's and so take everything that you said and multiply it by the number of facilities that have to be built still. And then the ones that are all living with all of those issues that were built in that you can't undo once they're built in in the physical world without extreme measures. Right. To go in and modernize and renovate these. So. Let's talk about how to get to those best outcomes, because that I think is really the topic here. And so, David, I want to I want to toss it over to you right in the beginning and talk about like SB jumped down to the micro level. But that is actually all of the things that the rooms need. And in a facility like a hospital, every room, not every room has a different program, but they all have like these room data sheets. They all have these requirements for. function and equipment and all of these kinds of, you know, materials and all these kinds of things, right? And so how does one keep track of it all? And so I'm curious, like, if you could maybe paint a picture of how, let's just call it a regular architect does it versus somebody who's maybe more technology forward. Speaker 4 (7:54) Yeah, a regular architect probably does it. And SB, you can certainly kick me under the virtual table if I'm wrong here, because I've been out of practice for a few years. A regular architect does it with about 30 different Excel files and a couple of Revit models and a SketchUp model and a roll of bumwad and a bunch of sketches and somebody that's had 30 years of healthcare planning experience that just knows where things go and where things won't fit. So there's like 30 different inputs. And that's traditionally where the big challenge lies, right? How do I gather all of this complex information across Excel files, across my models, across, how do I get, frankly, the biggest thing that I find as I'm getting older, that I think the biggest thing that we're having trouble unlocking is knowledge inside of people's heads. And I think really we're starting to see, and I talked to a lot of people that share this concern, that there is a huge knowledge gap. between the more senior level practitioners and the people that are doing the day-to-day work. And I, you know, I don't want to get too much on a soapbox and off on a tangent, but I think it ties into this conversation very nicely is that, you know, I think the promise of BIM was this kind of, you know, holistic, you know, building information model, data rich, we can spin it around and see everything. I personally feel like BIM almost made that divide worse. where the people that had all the knowledge tend to be afraid of the new technology and the people that are using the technology tend to not have that knowledge. And, you know, when I used to be on the practice side, you know, I wanted to punch somebody when they said, well, it's in the model. But where is it? It's in the model. So anyway, so I think ultimately what we're seeing is that, you know, in a traditional process, and certainly now as facilities have become more complicated with more requirements, There's just so much out there in so many different, you know, files and different softwares. And how do you get that all together to make those informed decisions and ensure that whatever decision you're making in whatever platform you're using is making its way out to everyone else? Speaker 3 (10:12) I want to take that a little further, David, and say, OK, so what's the best time to start gathering that information? Is it actually before? the answer. I'm leading the witness here, right? It's like, you want this information as early as possible. You want this information before the next project starts, right? I mean, in order to actually get off on the right foot and make sure that you're tracking this stuff all the way through, but experts don't know what they know. And so when they sit down at the table with the client and it just, the stuff just starts pouring out, it's like, oh, obviously this person knows everything, but. It's like on demand. It's on tap when you need it. But where else is it? It's nowhere. So how do you start to grab that information and get it usable for the next project? Or I'm sure you could even use this on existing projects, right? But it's like that process is tedious for people and maybe even overwhelming because it's not like you can hand somebody an application or a piece of paper and say, write down everything you know about this because that doesn't work like that. Speaker 4 (11:15) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Essentially, the way you do it is you need to get everything centralized into a structured database. And the reality is we're finding because there's more and more, you know, air quotes, data floating around out there, you know, there's much bigger data sets. And to be able to put that into a centralized location where it's structured so that you can easily identify the missing pieces, right? So to your point, Evan, you know, sometimes you just don't know what you don't know. Speaker 4 (11:47) you know, if you can set up a structure that says, hey, this is the stuff that's important. And again, this is why, you know, in health care, you know, it's so complex because there's so many requirements, there's so many codes, there's so many guidelines and regulations. And then there's facility standards to ensure that you're going to be putting the right, you know, the right pieces of equipment in every facility. So you have, you know, economies of scale and, you know, less challenges downstream with service and things like that. But being able to then centralize all of that in a structured location so that you can get a good clear picture of what you know and what you don't know, right? So then when you sit down and have your client user meetings, it's very easy then to convey to them, you know, whether this is, you know, my institutional knowledge, if I've done a hundred hospitals before and this is the way it should be, or... this is your facility standard because you've provided me your guidelines. It says this is how we want it done. Or this is just the code requirement, you know, that says it must be this way to be able to have that that amount of predefined information available. And then you're only, you know, you're putting the frosting on the cake, if you will. Again, going back to my recovering architect, it blows my mind that we treat every project like it's the first project we've ever done. And we are scrambling to... I was going to say, I Speaker 3 (13:10) think Anthony could agree with that. I've heard that from somebody else in the room. Speaker 4 (13:15) Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so I think now there's more technologies available to us where we can start to be smarter about, you know, making decisions based on stuff we already know, right? Let's not try to redefine what we already know. Let's make decisions based on those constraints. And there's tools available that help us kind of, you know, hone into those important conversations. Okay, so Speaker 3 (13:40) I want one last piece before I hand it off to Anthony. And that is, how much of that do you guys find? And so SB and David, both, how much of the information captured, if somebody does that, is reusable kind of job to job? Can you put a percentage on that? Because I think that really helps people understand, like, why. it would be a useful process to go through because, okay, now to your point, David, like if I don't want to start from a blank page the next time, how much am I actually hitting the ground running? Speaker 4 (14:12) Right. I'm interested to hear Espy's thoughts. I know that when we work with specifically our healthcare clients who are managing all of their design standards inside of a centralized database like ours, frankly, I would venture to guess 80 to 90 % of that information is predefined and templated. All right. And it gives you a nodding. Yeah. Good. SP, your thoughts? Speaker 1 (14:40) Yeah, absolutely. I was going to go as high as 90%. And really, it is what's so great about having the data and the constraints up front is that you leave more time to design. Right. And really. look at what's the perhaps operational Speaker 1 (15:04) improvement that we are going to solve for, you know, if you've worked for a client before, and this is their next, you know, clinical space, and we may talk through like, well, what's been going on in the previous building? How can we improve, you know, throughput in this primary care clinic? And now we can get down to where does design help the operational flow, because the room is the room. And even in a new shell of a building, then we're worried about just the geometry, right? The data is there. My engineers can be pre-engineering the building because they know how many of those types of rooms we have, what's in them. Again, where are the outlets? They already know. And then, you know, that can all be going on in the background and come together in the geometry of the building once you're in the modeling platform. Well, Speaker 3 (15:55) isn't that the perfect setup for what we're Speaker 4 (15:58) going Speaker 3 (15:58) to talk to Anthony about? So, okay, so one thing that I think is super important at this step is, okay, so you're coming at this from an information and a planning standpoint. Architects got into the business to design buildings, right? Now, what you're saying is, like, let's give them the tools to get to spend more time doing that. So, Anthony, how does your tool let people? actually design buildings now that we're taking this information from a database and syncing it up, for lack of a better term, into geometry so that we can actually start to play with layouts and all of that kind of stuff. Speaker 2 (16:37) Yeah, I want to touch on a couple of themes that both David and Espy were talking about and that you brought up, Evan, because one of the things we're starting to talk about is you know, how do you get that expertise out of, you know, somebody's head and into the project and conveyed. And I think one of the important things to also keep in mind is that some of the experts in the room are the clients, Speaker 3 (17:01) right? Speaker 2 (17:02) Like they know, as SB is talking about, how their facilities are operating, how they could operate better, et cetera. And a lot of what we do at Hype Bar is try to provide a space, not to make too much of a pun there, for that productive conversation to happen. In the course of my job, I talk to a lot of health care planners, and I have kind of lost count. of the number of times I've heard from a healthcare planner that, you know, I show the department heads into your elevations and I show the department heads plans and they nod and they nod and they nod. And then I show them a 3D view of the room and they go, wait, is that going to be there? Speaker 3 (17:49) And Speaker 2 (17:49) then they start actually having an operational conversation about this design that is underway. And thanks for the nod there, Espy, because I know I've heard it from you too. But I think what we found has been difficult for designers that they express to us is to facilitate that conversation in a way that leads to the better design