Automated Regulatory Compliance towards Quality Assurance in Healthcare Building Projects

Healthcare building projects are severely constrained by their associated regulatory frameworks. In this context, regulatory requirements define a basic outline upon which design is developed, as well as aid designers towards compliance to minimum standards. Automation has been explored by existing research focusing mostly on compliance checking (i.e., quality control). There has been limited developments within this domain related to quality assurance. This paper aims to highlight what are key needed improvements to enable the use of automation to promote quality assurance for regulatory compliance in healthcare building projects. For this purpose, an ongoing revision of a British healthcare design guidance document (HBN 11-01) was analysed according to a requirements’ taxonomy. Key areas of improvement needs were highlighted based on a series of interviews. Our main findings relate to identifying that despite the guidance character of regulatory documents in the UK, they are rarely used for this purpose, revealing the focus on quality control. In this context, the regulatory framework could be repositioned as a catalyst towards automated design quality assurance as long as (i) the regulatory documents are developed and revised to fit automated design processes; and (ii) there are compatible software developments to streamline design processes through automation.