Great resource for hospital facilities staff; perfect way to access & verify Life Safety drawings & features in the field!
Overall Satisfaction with PlanGrid
We use PlanGrid in the hospital facilities maintenance world regularly to view our life safety drawings and confirm the integrity of fire and smoke barriers, etc., during environmental rounds, and to note any life safety deficiencies found during weekly rounds or unscheduled inspections. We are also able to check the size of suites and smoke compartments while in the field, and to capture any changes in life safety features (due to remodels., etc) so our LS plans are updated accordingly.
We used PlanGrid on an iPad while walking portions of our 6m S.F. academic health center campus during our most recent joint commission survey, and the LS code surveyor loved it! Carrying one iPad where we had everything he might ask for at our fingertips sure beat carrying around 4 or 5 sets of LS drawings, some of which have up to 40 pages!
Now that joint commission engineers (LS surveyors) are being forced into the digital age and utilizing tech more, I expect more of them will expect to see hospital facility managers utilizing mobile access to their building floor plans during the survey, and PlanGrid is perfect for this.
- Accessing drawings on the fly. By having the PDFs readily available, you don't have to worry about internet connection issues or lagging issues by going to your plans on a website.
- Being able to measure suite sizes, mark issues etc right on the iPad while out in field, instead of carrying a note pad.
- PlanGrid has been focused on design & construction; I'd like to see more focus on user-friendly features (and marketing) to those of use MAINTAINING those facilities once they are built.
- We met with rep from PlanGrid last summer here in our office and listed some features we'd like to see included eventually. We were told she would take these notes home to the development team, but no one ever followed up with us for more details or to give us an update.
- PlanGrid missed a huge opportunity to market itself to healthcare facilities (where the need for such a product is increasing constantly) by not having a booth or presence at the national ASHE (Healthcare Engineering) conference. Many companies with similar technology were there; I was disappointed PlanGrid was not.
- It helped us "wow" a joint commission survey in 2016 and have a successful survey because he loved how we could access plans on an iPad, check suite sizes, and didn't have to carry around huge, heavy sets of life safety plans.