Case Study
CUSTOMER
Niagara Health
PROJECT
Complex Requirements Planning Software for New Hospital Project
BUILDING SIZE
~120,000 m2
LOCATION
Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada
INDUSTRY
Health Care
TRAX SERVICES
Roadmap Digitization and Validation, Standards Authoring, Custom Requirements Template
LINK
Customer Background
The Niagara Health System is a multi-site hospital amalgamation, comprising five sites serving over 450,000 residents across the 12 municipalities making up the Regional Municipality of Niagara, in Ontario, Canada. In 2026, Niagara Health will open a newly designed hospital in Niagara Falls. The South Niagara Hospital Project will be an integral part of a connected healthcare system that will improve the patient and caregiver experience and strengthen access to local services.
Project Overview
The Ontario Ministry of Health Capital Planning Process is used to manage new project proposals from inception to completion.
The Ministry of Health provides oversight through a rigorous approval process to fulfill their mandate to improve outcomes and contribute to healthier communities. The Ministry funds the majority of the project.
Each approval stage requires a set of proposal documents relating to various parts of the submission, and each document has a number of components. To help understand the complex interdependencies involved throughout the capital planning process, Niagara Health and Stantec Inc. developed a roadmap over the course of several workshops with invited experts from other health networks and hospitals. This effort produced an impressive wall-sized flowchart of relations and dependencies of deliverables.
To help the stakeholders involved in the capital planning process, Trax was engaged to design a scalable online translation of the physical roadmap into a searchable document management and process visualization tool.
Leveraging the Requirements Graph functionality that Trax developed to encode building standards, the software was extended to model the project-specific data. Node properties were created and the existing linking mechanism for upstream dependencies and downstream dependents was used to author all six Stages of the Infrastructure Ontario, Ministry of Health, Municipal, and Hospital processes.
The resulting requirements graph included related requirements from the WELL® Standard. In fact, the South Niagara Project is working toward being the first WELL Certified healthcare facility in Canada – focused on the health and well-being of the staff, physicians, volunteers, patients, families, caregivers and the Niagara community. To this end, Niagara Health has recently registered the South Niagara Project with the International WELL Building Institute to work towards becoming WELL® v2 Certified.
WELL® certification is recognized worldwide throughout the architectural/building communities, and is based on ten concepts: Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Movement, Thermal Comfort, Sound, Materials, Mind and Community. Using the same underlying requirements graph technology, Trax is encoding the WELL® Standard to help Niagara Health and other customers to integrate and automate the analysis of projects to determine the level of compliance given a specific design.
Scope of Work
Trax Services
Roadmap Digitization and Validation
Standards Authoring
Custom Requirements Template
Trax Platform
Roadmap Template Authoring
Responsibility Matrix Population
Standards Development and Integration
Document Management
Benefits Derived
Niagara Health derived the following benefits from the digitization of the roadmap:
Increased communications value of roadmap by having cloud-based controlled access, search, and navigation.
Database-driven, supporting incremental live update, named versioning and revision control, filtering.
Template instantiation for multiple simultaneous project-specific roadmap versions.
Project-specific roadmap also functions as a document management system storing all related documents.
Overall, the use of the Trax Platform minimized the effort needed to complete the Digital Roadmap and engage the team.