The Health Industry Business Communications Council's new set of standards for using radio-frequency identification tags to label and track medical products has received final approval from the American National Standards Institute, according to a news release.
The new standard, called ANSI/HIBC 4.0, includes guidelines for tagging healthcare products in a manner that will prevent radio frequency interference with medical devices. A June 2008 study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that ultra-high frequency tagging interfered with the operation of electronic medical devices in 63% of tested cases.
HIBCC’s new standards recommend that healthcare products be tagged using 13.56 megahertz high-frequency coding. The smaller read range is less likely to interfere with medical devices, HIBCC officials said.
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