Your life safety drawings are only as good as the last renovation.
The Joint Commission requires current and accurate life safety drawings. Buildings change every year and drawings rarely keep up — which is how a surveyor ends up standing in a corridor that doesn't match the plan.
What LS.01.01.01 EP3 actually asks for.
Accredited hospitals must maintain current and accurate drawings identifying the building's fire safety features. Surveyors use those drawings as a reference tool to verify that the building as it stands matches the protections it was designed with.
| Required on the drawings |
|---|
| Areas fully sprinklered, in partially sprinklered buildings |
| All hazardous storage locations |
| Fire-rated barrier locations |
| Smoke-rated barrier locations |
| Sleeping and non-sleeping suite boundaries — with sizes |
| Designated smoke compartment locations |
| Chute and shaft locations |
| Approved equivalencies or waivers |
Source: The Joint Commission, Life Safety LS.01.01.01 EP3.
Suite boundaries have sizes. Sizes need measurement.
The drawings drift
Every tenant fit-out, every department relocation, every wall moved for a new imaging suite makes the record less true. Nobody updates the life safety set for a project that "didn't change anything structural."
The originals are gone
Older campuses often can't produce a reliable base drawing at all — just a scan of a scan, undimensioned, from a firm that no longer exists.
Suite sizing is a measurement
"Suite boundaries with sizes" is not a drafting exercise. It's an area calculation, and it has to be defensible. We deliver it against ANSI Z765 with published uncertainty.
Occupied 24/7
You cannot close a wing to document it. We work in phases, after hours, and around clinical operations — capture is about fifteen minutes a space and half an hour on site for a standard interior, not a day.
One standard, many buildings
Health systems inherit buildings with a dozen drawing conventions. We apply one standard across the portfolio, so the set reads as a set.
| Deliverable | Format |
|---|---|
| DWG | |
| Suite boundary areas, ANSI Z765 compliant | DWG / PDF |
| Measured wall geometry — laser-derived, CAD-ready | DXF |
| DWG | |
| Web | |
We produce the measured base drawing your life safety consultant or engineer overlays the fire and smoke features onto. We are not a life safety code consultant, and we don't stamp drawings — we make sure the geometry underneath is right.
Beyond compliance
The same capture pays for itself twice. Facilities uses it for move planning and capacity. Construction hands it to bidders so tenant improvement pricing stops carrying a risk premium. Biomed and equipment planning stop measuring doorways by hand before every install.
Schedule capture after a renovation closes out and well before your survey window. Documentation produced under survey pressure is documentation produced badly.
What facilities directors ask.
Do you produce the life safety drawings themselves?
We produce the measured, accurate base drawing — geometry, dimensions, suite areas — that your life safety consultant or engineer marks up with barriers, compartments and equivalencies. Most compliance failures trace back to bad geometry, not bad markup. We fix the layer underneath.
Can you work in an occupied hospital?
Yes, and we assume it. Capture runs about fifteen minutes per space — call it half an hour on site for a standard interior, with walkthrough and handoff — so we work in phases around clinical operations, after hours when needed, and to whatever infection-control and access protocol you run.
How accurate are the suite areas?
99.5% on distance and 99% on square footage — wall distances measured to within 1 cm, against ANSI Z765 which permits 2% uncertainty.
We have 14 buildings. How is that priced?
As a portfolio, not as 14 jobs. Fourteen buildings earns the 15% portfolio rate; 20% starts at sixteen, and one standard is applied across everything.
Can you meet vendor credentialing requirements?
Certificates of insurance, NDAs, background checks and standard health-system vendor onboarding — send the packet with the scope.
How often should we re-capture?
After any renovation that moves a wall. Many systems put a standing annual agreement in place covering whatever changed that year, which is cheaper than rediscovering it during a survey.
What we actually deliver here
The services this work is usually scoped as: measured as-built drawings, emergency response floor plans and existing conditions survey. Everything comes off one capture of the building, and all of it is priced publicly — you can price your own project without talking to us first.
Related: facilities and institutions.