In all facilities, especially healthcare facilities, ensuring safety isn’t just about patient care—it’s also about constructing and then maintaining a truly safe building. One of the most critical and often overlooked components of infrastructure is Firestopping. In healthcare facilities such as hospitals, clinics, and medical buildings, firestopping and fire barriers are crucial factors in maintaining compliance, protecting lives, and ensuring the facility’s ability to operate and receive reimbursement from federal and state programs, including Medicare and Medicaid.
In this article, we’ll focus on how reality capture services combined with AI-powered analysis enable outstanding firestopping intelligence and maintenance at existing facilities, and how a real-world hospital is using that technology to keep its facilities safe and its doors open.
What is firestopping?
Firestopping refers to the method of sealing openings and penetrations in fire-rated walls and floors to prevent the spread of fire and smoke. These barriers are not just structural—they’re lifesaving.
Every wall in a facility can have a different fire rating. For example, some walls might need to block smoke only, while others must resist fire for one, two, or even four hours.
These ratings are dictated by building occupancy use cases and fire codes, which are especially stringent in healthcare environments. That’s because many occupants, such as patients, staff, and visitors, may need extra time to evacuate in the event of an emergency.
The role of firestopping in compliance and certification
In most places, hospitals are typically subject to inspections every three years by third-party agencies like the Joint Commission (JC). These inspections are essential for continued certification and eligibility for government reimbursements. The Joint Commission doesn’t just look at paperwork: they physically inspect above-ceiling spaces for holes and unsealed penetrations that could allow smoke or fire to travel between rooms.
For example, a hole around a pipe or conduit (no matter how small) can create a pathway for smoke, which is often the deadliest factor in a fire. Firestopping materials, such as fire-rated caulking, are used to seal these openings and ensure compliance with fire safety regulations.
One of the main challenges compliance officers have when inspecting fire walls, fire barriers, and properly sealed firestopping efforts is that when manually popping ceiling tiles and performing visual investigations, it’s often difficult or impossible to get good visibility in the ceilings above complex mechanical, electrical, and plumbing infrastructure. However, this is also where many penetrations in fire-rated walls occur.
This is precisely why healthcare facilities that want to maintain safe and compliant buildings are turning to digital firestopping reality capture to ensure these areas are properly protected.
How one hospital is using reality capture for better firestopping compliance
In a recent project, a 1,000,000 square-foot hospital system with multiple facilities underwent an internal inspection of its own fire-rated barriers. Their facility team attempted to identify and seal every above-ceiling penetration. Yet, when an external team followed up with a high-resolution, photo-based documentation process, they uncovered over 2,000 additional firestopping issues that had been missed.
Thanks to advanced image review powered by AI, every issue was cataloged by Multivista’s technology with photos, exact locations on floor plans, and severity levels. This allowed the hospital to systematically address each deficiency and document the repair with follow-up photos before the Joint Commission arrived.
Failing to prioritize firestopping has serious financial repercussions
When it comes to fire stopping, the cost of non-compliance isn’t just about safety . . . It’s also about dollars and operational continuity. In the hospital example above, the investment in fire-stopping analysis and documentation was approximately $80,000 for the entire 1,000,000 square feet. This is minimal compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars a hospital of that size could lose per day if it failed inspection and couldn’t see patients or bill for services.
Firestopping efforts can be made more manageable with intelligent, organized lists of issues needing attention
Because the hospital in the above example leveraged technology, its facilities team was immediately armed with a complete list of issues.
As a result of having all this information at their fingertips on a desktop computer or via the Multivista mobile app, firestopping maintenance efforts were organized, specific, and clear. Multivista’s task management solution provides clear data on all deficiencies, which are listed, logged, and indexed to floor plans. Additionally, the task system allows teams to assign work, follow up on issues, and ensure tasks get closed out.
Thanks to this workflow, the team could start from one end of the building and move from room to room, using mobile-accessible floor plans and photos. Each issue was addressed, fixed, and documented. This proactive approach ensured that when inspectors arrived, the hospital was confident in its compliance.
For any facilities team concerned about firestopping, better compliance begins with better intelligence
Firestopping is a safeguard not just against catastrophe but against operational disruption, financial loss, and, most importantly, threats to life. For healthcare organizations, where hundreds of renovation projects may be occurring at any given time—from running new wires to retrofitting rooms—it’s vital to maintain an up-to-date record of fire-rated barriers.
By taking a data-driven, visual-first approach, facility teams can stay ahead of compliance issues and ensure that inspections go smoothly. When it comes to fire-stopping, organizations that are most committed to safety are those ready to discover what they don’t know about their facilities and then swiftly ensure that all fire ratings are conducted properly, both because their operations depend on it and because the safety of everyone inside depends on it as well.
Learn more about how firestopping projects are audited and approved in this blog post or to talk to someone about exactly how firestopping assessment services might benefit your next project, call us for a demo.
