ANSI approves HIBCC standard that addresses 
RFID/medical device safety concerns

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) HIBC for Product Identification has been given final approval by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Also known as ANSI/HIBC 4.0, the new standard was developed by the Health Industry Business Communications Council (HIBCC), an accredited global standards development organization that was founded in 1983 to promote patient safety by creating industry-supported non-proprietary standards for healthcare product identification.

The RFID standard was already in early development phases when in June, 2008; the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the results of a study of electromagnetic interference (EMI) with medical equipment and devices in critical care environments from RFID technologies. The study concluded that ultra high frequency (UHF) from RFID and UHF interfered with medical devices in 63% of the tests conducted.

“Since we first published our initial position paper on RFID in 2007, HIBCC has consistently warned that the UHF implementations proposed by non-healthcare standards organizations and some RFID product vendors could create problems in hospitals,” said Robert Hankin, PhD., President of HIBCC. “Our position is that the use of generic retail identification standards in medical care settings poses unnecessary risks and the JAMA-reported RFID study confirmed our position by indicating that there can be serious consequences from RFID in critical care environments. Our newly approved standard can now serve as a roadmap for safer implementation,” said Hankin.

In ANSI/HIBC 4.0, HIBCC recommends that 13.56 Mhz High Frequency (HF) be adopted for healthcare item level tagging specifically because its smaller read range is less likely to result in EMI with medical devices.

www.hibcc.org