Asbestos Data Management in Hospitals of Strasbourg: A BricsCAD Case Study
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases
Applicable Industries
- Buildings
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Facility Management
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Building Automation & Control
- Inventory Management
About The Customer
The Hospitals of Strasbourg (HUS) is one of the oldest healthcare facilities in France, founded in 1105. It is now a group of five hospitals with over 630,000 square meters of facilities. HUS is the number one job provider in the Alsace region of France, with over 12,000 employees, including 3000 medical doctors. Its missions include care, research, and teaching. Many of their facilities are decades, if not centuries old, and approximately 70% of the area required asbestos data management to prevent sanitary, legal, and financial risks.
The Challenge
The Hospitals of Strasbourg (HUS), one of the oldest healthcare facilities in France, faced a significant challenge in managing their asbestos data. With over 630,000 square meters of facilities, many of which were decades or even centuries old, approximately 70% of the area required asbestos data management to prevent sanitary, legal, and financial risks. The management of asbestos data was a major document management challenge, as each building section containing asbestos needed to have the correct documents associated with it. Any action taken to diagnose, control, audit, neutralize, or remove the asbestos had to be fully documented. The traditional, decentralized way of managing documents was proving unmanageable for HUS. Without a central location to house the asbestos data and an easy way to relate this data to specific locations, it was difficult to access or share documents. This led to difficulties in providing all relevant documents to third-party contractors before they started work in HUS facilities, resulting in activities being conducted but never documented accurately, or duplicated due to lost or incomplete documentation.
The Solution
The solution to HUS's asbestos data management challenge began with replacing its traditional methods of storing documents with a centralized database to host all of their data related to asbestos. The other part of the solution was a custom application called Tessellat, developed by Liris, a local BricsCAD partner. Liris created a dashboard and a graphical user interface, powered by BricsCAD, that connected to the centralized database HUS had developed. Tessellat uses the .dwg format, an open file format used for technical drawings and blueprints by most CAD software, making it simple and economical to deploy and use. The BricsCAD-based graphical user interface gives users the ability to examine and tag 3D representations of HUS facilities, and the dashboard interface allows them to access building-related statistics and export the results in CSV format. Tessellat, in combination with HUS's centralized database of asbestos data, makes document management problems a thing of the past.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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