Healthcare
with the details that matter.
Hospitals, imaging suites, medical office buildings, and lab space. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Hospital renovation happens in buildings that never close, and above-ceiling congestion is the single largest source of change orders. Short overnight windows, infection-control requirements, and equipment delivery route studies shape how we schedule and scope the work.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Above-ceiling MEP
- Imaging suites
- Operating rooms
- Central plant
- Equipment routes
- Medical offices
Capturing a hospital that cannot close
Hospital renovation is above-ceiling work with a building around it. The capture order reflects that: the plenum first, while the department is quiet, then the rooms, then the plant and the route that new equipment has to travel.
Above the ceiling, department by department
Duct, medical gas, pneumatic tube, conduit, cable tray, sprinkler, and the structure holding it up, captured through whatever tiles may legitimately be lifted. This zone produces more hospital change orders than anything else in the building.
Rooms and circulation
Patient rooms, exam rooms, corridors, door clear widths, and the level changes and turning space along them. Clearance around a bed, a lift, or a piece of mobile equipment is measured in inches that no drawing records reliably.
Procedure and imaging suites
Operating rooms, cath labs, and imaging spaces, with their booms, lights, shielding, and the equipment envelopes that a replacement has to match. These rooms come with their own access rules, and MRI suites come with rules about what may enter at all.
Central plant and interstitial space
Air handling units, boilers, chillers, medical gas plant, and any interstitial or mechanical floor above the departments. In buildings with a walkable interstitial level, this is where the actual coordination happens.
Delivery route and campus exterior
From the loading dock to the room: door widths, corridor turns, lift car dimensions, floor level changes, and ceiling height along the whole path. The campus, roofs, and courtyards get captured from the air in the same mobilization.
Infection control, department schedules, and the MRI magnet
Work in an occupied hospital happens inside an infection control framework, not around it. Barriers, negative pressure enclosures, dust control, and the route a crew takes between clean and construction areas are decided by the facility's infection control assessment, and equipment coming into a patient care area is cleaned to the facility's protocol. Department schedules do the rest: an operating room is available between cases or at night, imaging is available when it is not booked, and patient units are captured with staff coordination and with patients and staff kept out of any imagery.
Imaging suites deserve their own paragraph. An MRI magnet is energized continuously, including when the scanner is not in use, and the safety zoning around it governs what ferrous equipment may cross the line — a steel tripod is exactly the sort of object those rules exist for. Capture in and around an MRI suite is planned with the facility's MR safety officer, on their terms, and the same caution applies in a different form to linear accelerator vaults and other shielded rooms where access is controlled for reasons unrelated to construction.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
What clinical projects need from the data
Hospital work has an unusual property: the same capture serves a renovation design, an equipment purchase, and a phasing plan, and each one wants a different slice of it. Scoping all three at once is cheaper than three visits.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Department renovation design | Revit model including above-ceiling services | The design team is fitting new work into a plenum that is already full, which only modeled systems can settle. |
| Imaging or OR equipment replacement | Point cloud plus room and clearance drawings | Vendors work to installation drawings with specific clearances, and the room has to be shown to satisfy them. |
| Getting the equipment to the room | Dimensioned route study along the full path | Every door, turn, lift car, and level change between the dock and the room is checked once, in advance. |
| Campus capital planning | Registered cloud across buildings plus roof and site mapping | One measured record over many buildings supports phasing decisions no single-building survey can inform. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
Where hospital projects lose money
- Assuming the ceiling can be opened — Above-ceiling access in a live department is granted tile by tile, not floor by floor, and often only in specific rooms at specific hours. Agreeing which tiles may be lifted before mobilization is what separates a plenum survey from an educated guess.
- Ignoring the interstitial level — Where a building has a walkable interstitial floor, services run there rather than in the ceiling below, and a scope written around patient floors captures none of it. The mechanical level is frequently the only place a new route can physically go.
- The route survey nobody ordered — An imaging unit that fits the room but not the corridor turn is a familiar and very expensive discovery. Route studies are cheap while the equipment is still on order and impossible once it is on a truck outside.
- Capturing a room mid-turnover — Mobile equipment, carts, and stored supplies land in the point cloud as though they were built in. Agreeing what is fixed and what is transient before the capture prevents a modeler from carefully drawing a crash cart.
Questions from facilities and clinical engineering
Can you work in an occupied patient care area?
Yes, within the facility's infection control requirements and with department coordination. In practice that means agreed hours, equipment cleaned to your protocol, barriers and dust control where the assessment calls for them, and care that patients and staff do not appear in captured imagery. Most patient floor work happens overnight for exactly these reasons.
Can you scan inside an MRI suite?
Only under your MR safety officer's direction, and the constraint is real rather than procedural: the magnet is always on, and standard survey tripods and instruments contain ferrous material. Planning happens with your MR safety officer, and the practical answer is often capturing the suite from outside the controlled zone with the room itself handled on their terms.
How much can you get in a four-hour night window?
More than most people expect, provided the route is planned and the escort is ready at the start rather than the end of the window. What kills a short window is decision-making on the floor — which rooms, which tiles, whose permission — so the productive approach is to settle all of that in a walk-through beforehand and use the window purely for capture.
Do you scan for phased construction planning?
It is one of the better uses of the data. Phasing depends on knowing where existing services cross the boundary between a phase and the department still operating next door, and those crossings are invisible on record drawings. A measured plenum lets the phasing plan be drawn against reality instead of hope.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
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