Spatial Modeling of the UIHC

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) are a 700-bed comprehensive academic medical center and regional referral center in Iowa City. Using architectural drawings obtained from the hospital architect as a starting point, we derived a graph model of the physical structure of the hospital. Eleven buildings or permanent building additions make up the main UIHC complex, for a total of 3.2 million gross square feet, covering about 13.8 acres. The straight-line distance from the northern end of the complex to the southern end is about 1,600 feet (roughly 0.3 miles or 3.6 blocks). The actual walking distance through the corridor system is about 2,000 feet. The number of floors varies from building to building, with some buildings having 9 floors and some designed to accommodate 10 floors.

Graph model superimposed on CAD representation of a portion of the second floor so as to preserve the general layout.

We modeled this space as a graph whose vertexes represent rooms and whose edges represent adjacencies between rooms. Corridors and large spaces (e.g., atriums and cafeterias) were partitioned into smaller spaces so that each vertex would correspond to an area of about the same size. The final graph model contains 19,554 nodes (i.e., rooms or corridor segments) and 23,566 edges, and, once overlaid on UIHC CAD drawings, results in a high-resolution spatial model of proximity and accessibility. Our model can be used to visualize a broad range of different types of data, such as infection data, patient occupancy, healthcare worker movement, and so on.

View of all 19.554 nodes and 23,556 edges in our UIHC graph model superimposed on a volumetric rendering of the 10 floor facility.