JAMA study rocks hospital RFID users

A new study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association is rocking the hospital world--which has begun to adopt RFID for a wide range of device and patient-tracking functions--by suggesting that such tagging can wreak havoc with critical-care equipment. Researchers in Amsterdam concluded that electromagnetic interference from RFID systems could cause unintended changes in equipment functioning. Researchers detected such changes in 34 out of 123 tests of 41 different medical devices. Of those 34 incidents, 22 were "hazardous," including total switch-offs and restarts of mechanical ventilators, complete stopping of syringe pumps and renal replacement devices and interruption of external pacemakers. In conducting the tests, researchers randomly used both passive and active RFID systems. Oddly enough, it was the passive tags, which don't have internal power and must be activated by readers that led to 63 percent of total incidents and 41 percent of the hazardous events. Active tags, which include battery power and don't require activation, don't seem to be as likely to affect other systems, researchers found.

To learn more about the study:
- read this Modern Healthcare article (reg. req.)

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