What Surveyors Really Want. Hint – They’re Not Trying to Ruin Your Week

Aug 26, 2026

By Dalene Anderson & Nicole Palmer

If you’ve worked in healthcare long enough, you’ve probably heard some version of this sentence:

“The Joint Commission is in the lobby.”

Nothing spikes your heart rate quite like those six words. Suddenly everyone starts walking a little faster. Someone is frantically looking for a work order from 2021. Coffee gets abandoned mid-sip. A department director who hasn’t visited Biomed in months magically appears asking if “everything looks good.”

We’ve all been there. Here’s the funny thing…

Surveyors aren’t usually looking for perfection. They’re looking for confidence. Can you explain your process? Can you prove you’re following it? Do your records match reality?

That’s really the game. Sure, they’ll look at PM completion rates. They’ll review documentation. They’ll trace equipment. They’ll ask questions. But what they’re really trying to determine is whether your hospital has control over its medical equipment program, or whether everyone’s just hoping nobody looks too closely.

Hope, as they say, is not a strategy.

So what can you do before the surveyors show up?  Start with the basics.

Spend a morning pulling a random sample of equipment. Can your team locate it? Does the asset tag match the CMMS? Is the PM current? Does the documentation tell the same story the equipment does?

You’d be surprised how quickly that exercise exposes little cracks before they become big problems.

If you have an outside biomedical team managing your equipment, they should be doing this regularly.  Ask how often they conduct audits on themselves and request to see the results.  Are they making sure your team is ready?

Another strategy we see successful hospitals use is conducting a mock survey a few weeks before expected survey windows. Having someone ask uncomfortable questions internally is a lot less stressful than answering them for the first time while an actual surveyor is standing beside you. MMS conducts ongoing and regular mock surveys where necessary.

Some organizations also bring in outside HTM resources, not because their department isn’t capable, but because a fresh set of experienced eyes often catches things that busy teams simply don’t have time to notice. Internal teams stay focused on patient care while someone else helps tighten documentation, reduce backlogs, or validate inventory before survey day.

That’s a much better plan than hoping nobody asks about that missing infusion pump.

Take Five

Before you finish your coffee, ask yourself:

✔ Could we locate five randomly selected assets right now?

✔ Would the equipment, our CMMS and our documentation all tell the same story?

✔ When was the last time someone outside the day-to-day operation tested our process?

✔ If we found a gap today, would we have a plan to fix it before a surveyor found it for us?

The best time to find a problem is when you still have time to solve it.