Healthcare construction is more complex and has a lot at stake. If not done right, these projects can be costly for everyone involved. Healthcare projects also require a higher attention to detail to keep everything running smoothly.
With more stakeholders involved in the process, companies need to be able to benchmark and be equipped for better prediction, transparency, and ultimately the ability to detect (and curb) problems, deviations, and cost overruns.
Automated progress tracking can meet these requirements and reduce manual effort, helping you complete your projects faster and on-budget.
Healthcare Projects Are More Complex With More Stakeholders
Progress tracking is critical for project success in healthcare because it allows for real-time monitoring of project performance and a faster identification of issues and challenges, and implementation of corrective actions.
By regularly monitoring progress and performance, project managers and teams can quickly identify areas that are falling behind schedule or budget—and take the necessary steps to address them before they become major issues. Accurate and reliable progress tracking is essential for effective communication and coordination, especially with multiple stakeholders and a higher level of complexity.
Progress tracking can be beneficial beyond one single project, too. Objective progress data and insights can also help to identify areas of success and best practices that can be replicated in other projects, improving overall project performance and company-wide outcomes.
Greater Complexity Requires Greater Transparency
Automated progress tracking can improve transparency during hospital construction by providing real-time, accurate information on the progress of the project. Automated systems can be configured to collect data from a variety of sources, create a single source of truth and present the information in a format that is easy to understand and always accessible.
With the enhanced, real-time visibility that automated progress tracking brings, stakeholders are able to see exactly where the project is at any given time. This clear picture of project status helps improve communication, transparency, and accountability with objective data that eliminate any debate in progress tracking.
Automated progress tracking is a faster way of providing stakeholders with access to the same information. With an automated system, stakeholders are able to see the same data and reports, regardless of their location. Ensuring everyone is working with the same information saves time in reporting and mitigates the possibility of miscommunication or misunderstanding.
Since hospital construction projects often involve large sums of money and have a significant impact on patient outcomes, it’s also useful to have an auditable record of each project’s progress that can be used in demonstrating accountability to funders and regulatory bodies.
Catch Problems Early to Reduce Cost Overruns
Healthcare construction projects need an efficient way to manage and mitigate risk. Proper real-time visibility into the progress of the project can help spot potential issues before they become major problems. This enables project managers and other stakeholders to take proactive measures, rather than waiting until it is too late to take corrective action.
For example, if progress tracking reveals a particular aspect of the project is running behind schedule, the project manager may be able to adjust the project plan to effectively avoid potential delays or cost overruns.
Additionally, progress tracking can help project managers manage and coordinate dependencies between different parts of the project, which further reduces the risk of delay, prevents trade stacking, and mitigates other issues arising from one part of the project impacting others.
Pair Project Tracking With Benchmarking
Progress tracking can help with benchmarking by providing a clear understanding of the current status of the project, including the status of all trade and any related delays or setbacks. This data can then be used to compare the project’s progress against similar projects or industry standards, making it easier to identify areas where improvements can be made.
With multiple sources of information on a single project, a digital progress tracking tool can deliver accurate data to one shared source of truth, making benchmarking markedly easier.
Additionally, progress tracking stored data can be leveraged for benchmarking future progress against previous internal projects for better forecasting future project and completion dates, as well as for identifying potential cost savings or other opportunities to optimize the project.
Leveraging Powerful Progress Tracking for Healthcare Projects
The more detailed information teams have on the progress of a project, the more proactive they can be to keep it on track. Identifying potential issues early on allows for corrective action to be taken sooner rather than later, reducing hours, rework, and delays to deliver projects on time and on budget. But detailed and timely progress tracking shouldn’t come at the cost of crews’ time and resources.
That’s where a solution like Doxel’s automated progress tracking can help. Doxel significantly reduces hours tracking progress, while delivering accurate, reliable objective insights that improve communication and transparency across all stakeholders.
Click here to learn more about how Doxel’s AI-powered progress tracking paired with 360-degree video capture can help ensure hospital construction projects stay on track and on budget.
Healthcare projects are not typical commercial construction. Aside from the complexity and cost, healthcare carries a higher level of risk and liability with patient care depending on the outcome of the project. With more at stake, accuracy and predictable outcomes are paramount to the success of the project.
At the foundation, there are three pillars to success for any healthcare project: transparency, risk management, and benchmarking.
Let’s take a look at each of these pillars—and at how automated progress tracking can help companies meet these requirements to help teams complete projects on time and under budget.
Build Transparency and Communication Into Every Process
Transparency between owners, general contractors, and subcontractors is critical in hospital construction because it ensures every step of the way that the project is following the schedule, budget, and required quality standards.
Clear communication and the sharing of real-time information makes it easier to identify and resolve any issues that may arise during the construction process, which can prevent delays and cost overruns.
Additionally, proper transparency makes sure all parties are working towards the same goals and that everyone is aware of the project’s progress and any necessary changes. In the case of hospital construction, it’s important that transparency is maintained to ensure the safety and well-being of the patients, staff, and visitors—both during construction and after it’s completed.
How can construction companies improve transparency among all stakeholders? Here are five processes that can help.
Use autoated progress tracking software: Utilize progress tracking software that has real-time updates and progress tracking capabilities. This will enable both the owner and GC to access the same information from the same place, so everyone can stay on top of the project status. Also, make sure the solution is tracking all visible trades so that your data has the granularity needed to effectively manage the project
Share progress reports: Send regular progress reports to all stakeholders, including the owner, the GC, and other members of the project team. Reports should be easy to read and understand, and should clearly show the progress of each task, any issues that came up, and any changes that were made.
Communicate effectively: Establish standardized digital communication channels, such as email or instant messaging, to share updates and progress reports. This will eliminate the risk of a message getting lost while ensuring that everyone is on the same page so problems can be identified and addressed quickly.
Use visual tools: A picture or graph speaks louder than words. Leverage visual tools such as Gantt charts, timelines, and progress bars to provide a clear and easy-to-understand view of the project status. This helps teams reduce misunderstandings and increase transparency.
Schedule regular meetings: Implement a consistent cadence of meetings between the owner, the general contractor and other stakeholders to review progress, discuss issues, and plan for next steps.
Mitigate Risks For Better Outcomes
Due to the costs and complexity of healthcare projects, it is crucial to mitigate risk to ensure safety, quality, and compliance. Risk is inevitable in construction, but there are steps you can take to reduce and ensure better outcomes for your projects.
Develop a comprehensive project plan: This should include detailed project scope, schedule, budget, and risk management plan. Doing this helps make sure that all parties are aware of the project’s goals and objectives, and have a clear understanding of where the project’s progress should be at all times.
Communicate consistently: Identifying and resolving any issues that may arise starts with effective communication. The faster all parties are alerted to potential risk, the quicker everyone can spring into action to mitigate or eliminate it from becoming a bigger problem later down the road.
Use automated progress tracking: AI-powered progress tracking can provide real-time information and analytics on the project’s progress, and helps identify areas of risk without relying on the manual efforts of the project team.
Conduct a thorough risk assessment: Identify potential risks and proactively develop mitigation strategies to reduce the likelihood of those risks occurring.
Establish a quality control program: Implementing a comprehensive quality control program ensures that all work is performed to the required standards, and leveraging technology to check for quality means any problems are found faster.
Make it easy to access Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools: Utilizing BIM can improve communication and collaboration, and provide a visual understanding to better maintain quality and standards.
Continual monitoring and review: What you don’t know could come back to haunt you. By continually monitoring and reviewing project progress at every phase, it’s easier to make adjustments as needed for the project to stay on track and within budget.
Implement an effective change management process: Establishing a collaborative change management process means that any changes to the project are properly documented, reviewed, and communicated, so everyone can adapt quickly as needed.
By following these steps, healthcare construction projects can manage risk and improve outcomes. Even better, there’s technology that alleviates the manual component to many (if not all) of the steps needed to mitigate risk.
By pairing 360-degree video capture with AI-powered progress tracking, teams are able to objectively measure progress of work in place with every data capture, every week. This provides healthcare construction projects with real-time information on the progress and quality of what’s been completed.
Automated progress tracking is the best way to bridge everything together to keep project teams on the same page and catch potential issues faster with enough time to fix them—ultimately preventing delays and unnecessary overruns. This greater degree of transparency and accountability helps to ensure that all parties are meeting their obligations and building to the required standard of the project.
Benchmark For More Predictable Outcomes
Benchmarking in healthcare construction provides a way to measure and compare the performance of different projects. Leveraging benchmarks helps to identify best practices and areas for improvement, which can be used to set goals and targets for future projects. Benchmarking can also reveal trends and patterns across projects to identify any potential risks and opportunities earlier on.
Healthcare construction benchmarking can inform decision making and contribute to the success or failure of a project. For benchmarking to be most impactful, project progress should be collected in a standardized and repeatable way. Implementing an automated way to analyze project progress in real time helps save time and ensure meaningful insights—ultimately leading to more predictable outcomes, as well as improved quality, cost, and schedule performance.
Leverage AI-Powered Progress Tracking For Project Success
Automated progress tracking works to streamline the three pillars for project success by providing objective information and greater visibility into the project’s progress. Between project teams and stakeholders, everyone is able to be more closely involved to make more informed decisions faster.
With all parties working towards the same goals, everyone is aware of the objective progress metrics as well as any changes needed. With the right solution in place, teams can increase efficiency, decrease risk, and save valuable time and resources.
Not sure where to get started? Click here to learn more about Doxel’s digital surveyor and analytic tools for healthcare construction today.
With inflation and rising cost of materials, it’s critical for healthcare companies to keep construction projects on schedule and within budget. Here are 4 ways to help verify your construction billing and keep your project on budget.
1. Reduce overbilling and cash outflow
Automated construction progress tracking provides an objective view into exactly where the project stands, which can help mitigate contractors overbilling for a higher percentage of completion. Companies that use a single source of truth for progress tracking (like Doxel) can reduce monthly bills by up to 10%.
With money still left on the table, contractors will be more motivated to finish the job so they can get paid.
2. Gain better visibility into change orders
Change orders are inevitable—but transparency around them should be, too. Before a major healthcare provider started working with Doxel, they estimated 4% of their total spend was caused by inaccurate progress tracking. These additional COs are passed onto the healthcare company, and are avoidable with the right solution in place.
Leveraging AI-powered progress tracking takes the mystery out of CO estimates. While using Doxel, one healthcare company found their typical change order estimates were inflated by at least 10%. That money is going out the door, and eventually it will add up. With more accurate project tracking, companies can more accurately pinpoint where change orders should be and reduce unnecessary spend.
3. Make the most of HealthTrust materials
Due to the unpredictability of material requirements, HealthTrust Contracts run the risk of being underutilized, and healthcare companies miss out on potential rebates and discounts offered. Doxel helps drive 100% contract utilization with more accurate, objective, and standardized measurement of materials installed across projects—which in turn allows more materials purchased through HealthTrust and greater financial savings.
For one Doxel healthcare customer, that meant the ability to purchase 10% more through HealthTrust, and the savings added up to a whopping $18.56M annually through discounts and rebates on materials.
4. Save contractor time and improve productivity
Time is money. When a project’s progress is manually tracked, the process itself to collect and report on the data takes valuable time away from contractors and field teams. What used to take 60+ hours of manpower a week to manually assess progress now takes a mere 3 hours per week using an automated solution like Doxel. All that time can now be focused on safety, quality control, and coordination of trade partners.
See why healthcare companies (and contractors) choose Doxel
Doxel’s image recognition gives healthcare facilities objective progress data and real-time insight into materials installed. With automated project tracking, everyone wins—contractors spend less time counting and reporting, and healthcare companies have better control over project costs and governance.
Healthcare facilities using Doxel are delivered earlier with increased safety, less expense, and higher quality. To learn more about how they do it, schedule a demo today.
Doxel, an AI-based construction technology solution that enables proactive risk mitigation of projects and portfolios, announced its integration with Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM), the solution for globally prioritizing, planning, managing, and executing projects, programs, and portfolios.
The Doxel and Oracle integration will enable customers to track construction progress continuously and automatically against their Oracle Primavera P6 schedules. Unlike manual methods of progress reporting that can be subjective or delayed, Doxel’s AI technology enables Oracle’s customers always to have real-time, objective visibility into their schedule performance.
The impact?
Proactive mitigation of delays and identification of opportunities to accelerate construction—enabling customers to deliver their projects faster while collecting valuable benchmark data for future planning in Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM.
“This integration with Primavera P6 is by popular demand from our mutual customers, and we couldn’t be more excited,” says Saurabh Ladha, chief executive officer of Doxel. “Nearly 100% of our customers use Primavera P6 for scheduling, and this unification of workflows will supercharge our customers’ abilities to manage their projects and portfolios proactively.”
Doxel, based in Menlo Park, California, has built a widely adopted platform that applies AI and computer vision technology to 360-degree video of construction sites and measures progress in a granular, real-time, and automated fashion, and then contextualizes actual progress against Primavera P6 EPPM plans.
Through Doxel’s cloud-based dashboard, customers can instantly see where they’re ahead and behind, informing their decisions with data that can always be trusted and delivered in time for proactive actions that ultimately land projects on schedule and budget.
“We see project teams use Doxel AI and Primavera P6 side by side in construction trailers. P6 is an amazingly powerful scheduling and planning tool and requires information from the field that can accurately, objectively, and with higher frequency measure and constantly update progress. Because if you don’t have high-quality data feeding into it, its value diminishes exponentially,” says Garrick Ballantine, Doxel’s chief revenue officer.
He adds, “General contractors and owners use the combination of P6 and Doxel to objectively partner with their trade partners on a week-to-week basis, bringing the field and office on the same page with our cloud-based visual dashboard and to make payment decisions on billions of dollars’ worth of construction nationally. This integration has happened because the industry demanded it.”
Frank Malangone, Oracle’s executive director of innovation and industry strategy, said, “Our customers continue to look for ways to objectively and accurately measure progress to update the schedule for reliable insights. This connection between Primavera P6 and Doxel speeds up this process without constantly having to be at the job site and improves communication and coordination between the office and the field.”
In his February 5, 2023 opinion piece in the New York Times, Ezra Klein rings the alarm that the $1.6 trillion U.S. construction industry has not shared the productivity gains of other industries. He cites Goolsbee and Syverson’s paper “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector,” which explains that construction productivity has decreased since 1950 while manufacturing productivity, for example, has increased ninefold. I appreciate Mr. Klein’s alarm as well as his humility in admitting he has no idea how we get construction productivity rising again. Two decades into a career focused on bringing productivity gains to construction, I do have an idea.
But before I get to my idea, let’s consider Mr. Klein’s prime culprit – regulatory “paperwork, and paperwork, and more paperwork.” No doubt regulation impacts construction productivity; regulation impacts most industries. While Syverson’s paper does not provide data connecting productivity declines to increased regulation, it does note that the construction industry invested 46 percent less in R&D and software purchases compared to the broader economy in 2020. And, a separate paper by Syverson, “The Slowdown in Manufacturing Productivity Growth,” (my fellow construction colleagues will take solace in knowing we are not alone in facing Syverson’s economic scrutiny) explains that information technologies (IT) were the main driver for productivity gains in manufacturing from 1994 to 2005.
Why did IT so dramatically impact manufacturing, but not construction? In both construction and manufacturing, IT can improve productivity once information about the real world is transformed into data. Consider an assembly line producing widgets. The assembly line has sensors that send data to machines to respond in real time and to plant managers who learn of bottlenecks and continuously improve the assembly line. This investment in sensors produces the data that powers IT and drives productivity increases.
Applying IT to construction is not so easy. While a factory produces millions of widgets, a construction project is the assembly of millions of different components to produce only a single facility. A single sensor cannot automatically monitor the installation of thousands of square feet of walls or linear feet of ductwork. And that limitation means that IT is starved of data that would help construction workers and managers gain insights to continuously improve their processes. Thus, until recently, investment in IT has been limited to the design phase and certain aspects of construction administration. Yet, labor is the greatest cost on any project in the U.S. And, IT has had virtually no impact on the productivity of that skilled craftworker laying a brick or welding a beam to a column.
But, that reality is changing. With artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision, leading builders are transforming 360 video into near real-time measurements of construction processes. This near real-time reality capture of the construction site acts like sensors in a factory, feeding IT with data that empowers project teams to increase productivity. For example, a construction superintendent constructing a retirement community recently used this automated progress tracking technology to identify that a certain duct installation activity was not yet complete on the 3rd floor. Ceilings were set to be installed the next day. Without this insight from technology, the unfinished ductwork would have been covered up by the ceiling trade partner. And, when they later discovered the oversight, they would have had to rip open the ceiling. That rework would have put a big dent in their productivity. Instead, the AI-powered IT indicated the ductwork was not 100% complete. Augmented with this information, the superintendent applied his expertise in coordinating trades to get the ducts installed right away to avoid the rework. And, the general contractor and retirement community owner no longer had to explain to residents why they were going to be moving in two weeks late.
This technology is new; we only began building it in 2015. But we’re seeing results. At Doxel, we’ve created automated progress tracking for construction that reduces time spent manually tracking progress by 95%. This automation creates data that is now fueling productivity gains from IT just like in manufacturing. And, it gets data to decision makers 5x – 10x faster, which gives 5x – 10x the opportunities to unlock the full potential of construction teams to accelerate schedules and deliver projects under budget. We’re not alone in augmenting construction team expertise with AI; companies such as Procore, Autodesk, Oracle, Dusty, Rhumbix and dozens of others have built technology that makes construction easier for millions of workers every day. And, forward looking facility owners are hungry to adopt solutions that reduce their risk and make the job easier for superintendents and trade partners, because they know the investment will translate to projects that are on time and on budget.
Of course, an industry’s health depends on more than a single metric. Construction provides nearly 11 million jobs in the U.S., including many high paying roles that do not require a college degree. They are rewarding jobs that contribute to society. But, the work is not easy. It frequently requires complex problem solving or complex physical skills. These are great jobs, partially because they can’t be easily automated to increase productivity. Still, productivity is an important metric not just for economists, but because it tends to correlate with the industry’s per capita income. According to Syverson, construction pay could be 10% higher if the industry’s productivity gains tracked the economy as a whole. Society needs construction to be easier, too. As we face challenges supplying healthcare, delivering energy, and investing in infrastructure, construction will either be a bottleneck to change or it will be a catalyst to change. AI augments the experience and skills of construction teams, so they have better data and tools and owners have the confidence to invest in projects that solve society’s 21st Century challenges.
Written by Reid Senescu, California Licensed Professional Engineer and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. He is the Vice President of Product at Doxel.ai in Menlo Park, California. His research focused on how technology can improve construction team collaboration. At Doxel.ai, his products use computer vision to help teams collaborate and deliver projects on time and on budget.
