The Health Industry Business Communications Council (HIBCC), an accredited global standards organization, has been given final approval by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for the radio frequency identification (RFID) for product identification standard, also known as ANSI/HIBCC 4.0.

This 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 on electromagnetic interferences (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 nonhealthcare standards organizations and some RFID product vendors could create problems in hospitals,” says HIBCC president Robert Hankin. “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.”

In ANSI/HIBCC 4.0, HIBCC recommends that 13.56 Mhz high frequency be adopted for healthcare item-level tagging, because its smaller read range is less likely to result in EMI with medical devices.