MHA Society for Health Care Engineers

2009 EC standards combine safety and security concerns

In renumbering its EC standards, The Joint Commission has made some notable revisions that safety officers will want to be aware of:

• Perhaps most prominently, general safety and security--currently EC.1.10 and EC.2.10--will be combined into one standard, EC.02.01.01
• The safety competency requirements have returned to the chapter under EC.03.01.01; they were previously in the human resources chapter
• The no-smoking standard (currently EC.1.30, soon to be EC.02.01.03) has lost some of its elements of performance, and will have a more straightforward series of provisions

The revised EC standards go into effect on January 1, 2009.

[ via Hospital Safety Connection ]

JAMA Reports on New Study

The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a study from the University of Amsterdam on "Electromagnetic Interference from Radio Frequency Identification Inducing Potentially Hazardous Incidents in Criticare Medical Equipment" (JAMA June 25, 2008-Vol 299, No. 24) in which they documented a number of cases of interference with a variety of commonly used critical medical devices. This well documented study shows that RFID devices in both the active and passive design may cause interference to critical medical devices.

Interference classified as hazardous was noted in a range from six feet to a few inches for nine different types of medical devices. The author's state that the tests are based on the specific signal characteristics of their RFID system and do not necessarily apply "to other RFID systems if based on different signal characteristics or deployments."

In addition, in order to mimic a worst case scenario, they used maximum power settings. Their conclusion is that RFID systems should have on-site Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) tests done before installing a system.

With the number of wireless devices being introduced into hospitals increasing, this study should remind hospitals to properly manage the use of the electromagnetic spectrum in-house by pre-installation testing under all reasonable operating conditions of wireless medical devices and continuous monitoring and investigation of all reports of "interference."

[ via ASHE E-News ]