RFID: Hazardous to Your Health
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The adoption of radio-frequency identification tags at hospitals has been touted as a way to improve patient safety and track and trace medical equipment. But new research suggests RFID tags may electronically interfere with medical devices, making them potentially hazardous to patients' health. |
An abstract posted Wednesday on the Website of the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes:
In a controlled non-clinical setting, RFID induced potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices. Implementation of RFID in the critical care environment should require onsite EMI (electromagnetic-interference) tests and updates of international standards.
Researchers conducted the tests in May 2006 using 41 medical devices from 22 manufacturers at the Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. No patients were connected to RFID tags. Researchers classified EMI incidents as hazardous, significant or light according to a critical care adverse events scale.
An analysis of the data from 123 EMI tests—three per medical device—showed that RFID induced 34 incidents: 22 were classified as hazardous, two as significant and 10 as light.
Dr. Donald Berwick, CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, in a JAMA editorial writes: "Safety is not a condition, it is a process. It can only emerge continually in a culture that is alert, cooperative, transparent, and resilient when the unexpected happens, as it always will."
This isn't the first warning about RFID devices in medical settings. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health noted the risks involving RFID tags:
To date, FDA has received no reports of injuries resulting from RFID. But preliminary FDA testing has shown that some RFID emitters potentially could slow the rate of pacemakers or cause implantable cardioverter defibrillators to deliver inappropriate shocks. Other electronic medical devices could also react inappropriately in the presence of RFID.
That's a healthy dose of common sense.
