In the past 6 months, demand for fire door inspections has grown exponentially – especially in health care facilities because of the CMS and Joint Commission adoption of the 2012 edition of NFPA 101 – The Life Safety Code.  One of the challenges when instituting a fire door inspection program is finding a way to store the information gathered during the inspection, utilize it after the inspection is complete, and retrieve the relevant information the next time an inspection is conducted.  (There’s more information about fire door inspections on the Fire Door page of this site.)

About 5 years ago I was in a large hospital that had just spent thousands of dollars (probably tens of thousands) to have a “pre-Joint-Commission inspection” done.  I asked the facility manager if I could see the data from their survey, and he handed me a stack of paper several inches high with information about each fire door in the hospital.  He had questions about some of the doors, so we attempted to use the paper forms to figure out which doors we needed to look at.  Then the problem was finding the door openings within the building, so we could see the problem first-hand – there was not enough detailed information on the forms.

For me, a huge stack of paper forms is cumbersome and needlessly difficult to deal with.  Considering the technology available today, there has to be a better way.  Last week I received the video below, which describes a fire door inspection app from DoorData Solutions.  I am not affiliated with this company, but I have seen the software and have known the owner of the company for years.  Hal Kelton is an AHC/CDC, an FDAI, a CDT, and is also an AAADM-certified inspector, so he obviously understands doors and hardware.

Check out the video, and leave any questions in the reply box.  Hal will be happy to answer them.

DOORDATA 2.0 from Hal Kelton on Vimeo.

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Do you have another solution or tip for fire door inspection?  Let me know!

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