BIM-Enabled Design for Hospital Retrofit in China: A Case Study

With the increasing demand for healthcare in China, the retrofit of old hospitals has become an effective practice to upgrade hospitals and improve the healthcare environment. How to fully utilise digital design to retrofit old buildings to improve functionality, reduce energy consumption, shorten building cycles and reduce retrofit costs becomes a significant challenge for the industry to meet the environmental quality needs of patients and healthcare workers. This research explores the industry practice of a leading hospital design institute in China by adopting a single case study of the Beijing Ditan Hospital retrofit project. It reveals the status quo, challenges and prospects of adopting BIM-enabled design in China’s hospital retrofit. The results show that the BIM-enabled design faced the challenges of the Beijing Ditan Hospital retrofit in terms of the complexity of design requirements, functional partitioning and environmental changes through six functions: storage, integration, connection, automation, visualisation and statistical analysis.